Our webinar experience

Today Lutie Sheridan and I presented our webinar on Summon: “Web-scale discovery: the user experience brought” which was organised by Richard Levy from Serials Solutions. The subject of the webinar was the findings of our user studies on Serials Solutions' Summon conducted at Edith Cowan University Library during 2010 and 2011.

We had about 33 people online from all around the place, mainly in Australia. I think it went quite well, but it is a somewhat unreal experience talking into the phone to 30+ people.

You need to be skilled at multitasking to do one of these things. The speaker-phone did not work, so we had to pass the phone back and forth to present the slides, and then later to answer questions. The questions appeared as text in the chat box and Richard repeated them to us as well.

Lutie commented that it was like talking on the phone when you get no "ah-ha" comments coming back at you...no verbal or visual cues. Another colleague mentioned having once done a phone job interview with a panel of interviewers firing questions and you have no visual cues.

Later I found out that some people were unable to log in. It’s always tricky with the technology in these events.

Richard Levy of Serials Solutions recorded the whole presentation including questions and responses. I believe he will be making it available at some stage.

My advice if you decide to do a webinar as presenter: prepare, check out the technology before hand and try to RELAX and have fun with it!!