Managing research data: new roles for librarians

The week before last Constance and I gave a presentation at the Intelligent Information Symposium in Sydney. The slides for our talk on Managing research data: new roles for librarians are here:

Managing research data: new roles for librarians

View more PowerPoint from Julia Gross

Using iPads to present a session

At our iPad training session, or should I say Q and I session, as that is what is really is, Jarrod got us thinking about how to use the iPad as a presentation tool in a classroom setting. We were wondering what would be a good app for showing Powerpoints. I have asked my Twitter connections and on campus colleagues and have nothing definitive to report.

As I understand it PowerPoint being a Microsoft product has no easy app to present using iPad. It is best to use Keynote (Apple) to develop your presentations. But if you don’t operate in a Mac environment then that gets complicated. You can do conversions of PowerPoint into Good Reader, but then that results in a fairly static display, using swipe, rather than click to move forward. Our group has discussed this and thought maybe presentations were still best done via laptop, where you can walk around without being fixed to the iPad. It would be interesting to hear from others how successfully larger group presentations work using iPad.

Using the iPad at a conference

I attended the Intelligent Information Symposium in Sydney last week and took my iPad. We were presenting, so I decided to leave my laptop behind and just rely on the iPad. Constance, my co-presenter, placed the presentation PowerPoints on Dropbox and we both put our conference presentation notes and PowerPoints on our iPads using the iPad app, Good Reader. I also used the iPad app, Pages for taking notes during the presentations.

Advantages:

• Using Good Reader meant I had all the associated conference PDFs, documents and PowerPoints at hand
• Using Pages you can take your conference notes instead of toes on paper that have to be transcribed later, or notes on a laptop that need to be lugged around.
• The iPad is much lighter than a laptop.
• For some of the papers I used Twitter as my notes update method.
• Using the conference WiFi you can keep up with email, Twitter etc

Disadvantages:

• Where to stash it when you are having tea, coffee or lunch? It is too big to fit in your handbag, so you need to carry another sac, or backpack.