My presentation – Open Standards in Education
The day before my presentation I carefully did a check with my laptop and the projector, it worked perfectly. I had the Compiz cube running on Ubuntu with my presentation on one face, a browser opened to the Moodle demo course on another face and on the other two faces I had VNC links to the screens of the EeePC and OLPC XO laptop. It was a totally cool setup and I had tested in place on the projector I would be using and it all worked perfectly.
On Wednesday, an hour before my presentation I sat at the back of the conference room and set up the three laptops again, checked they were all networked together and everything was working just right. Then at the end of the session before me I went to the podium and plugged in the big laptop, just as I had tested the day before. Up on the big screen came a quarter of my laptop screen. I flicked a few settings and ended up with even less. Restarted, I couldn’t get even the laptop screen running at a reasonable resolution. AARRGGHH! Not what you want at the start of a presentation. After a couple of minutes messing with screen settings I had to give up. I copied what I thought was the right presentation onto a USB stick and plugged the EeePC into the projector to run my presentation from that (without all the Compiz niceness). When I was about three slides in I noticed that I wasn’t using the latest version of the presentation! I got through most of the content and the demos, but it was a bit of a presenter’s nightmare. I didn’t even have a screen in front of me (because the EeePC screen is smaller than the projector resolution) so I had to keep looking sideways at the big screen to see where I was. Here are the slides I intended to present in ISO 26300 ODF format
Open-Standards-in-Education.odp
and below as a flash presentation. Tip for anyone who wants to publish presentation slides as flash. Open your presentation in OpenOffice.org then select file-export and find the Macromedia Flash option. It isn’t an open standard format however it has a Free implementation and it is quite well documented.
I hope the technical issues didn’t distract too much from the presentation. Several people did tell me they enjoyed it and I think overall it was OK, I just know the next one will be better.
It took about 13 words to know exactly where you were going with that.