Tour Stop 1: Hobart Workshops

Today was the start of the tour- with the opening session for a great audience in Hobart Tasmania. Hosts Jen and Elisabeth were excited that they had an audience of more than 60 sign up and show up, some of them driving 4 or more hours from the northern regions (One group even used that as their story project, see links below).

What a great, enthusiastic bunch this was, especially as the presenter was coughing and had fading voice into the afternoon. The session started with my “Being There” presentation (one that will be recast several times on this circuit, sometimes in shorter installments), which I have just uploaded to slideshare:

And I did record some audio (1:29:00, 59 Mb, a big file, yes) with my Edirol R-09 mp3 recorder, posted by not really edited at all. Unfortunately, I seem to have forgotten to pack my AC adapter for the recorder, so I lost the battery juice after that recording (apparently the USB cells are not really long lived). This presentation is pretty much, “Alan’s Personal View on Technology”, but I seemed to have hot some high notes in showing quirky web things like Twitter or LOLCATS and showing how I suggest we need to look past inane content produced in web apps to what the capabilities are. Oh shoot, I just forgot a slide I wanted to have in there. Back to the lab…

I have an amazing story of web serendipity to come in the post after this. Stay tuned.

After that, we moved into the 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story hands on session, and this crowd truly dived into this, exploring different web tools, and coming up with some demonstratable outputs for even this short 45 minute immersion.

Some examples:

• We used slideroll to make a simple story about “searching” (for a library presentation). Really really easy to use.
• Cathrine and Lynne did a story about travel.
• Read about Jorge’s trip from Spain to Copenhagen
• Here are some photos from my holiday. Enjoy!
• John’s extensions Start to finish images showing the extension project.
• Electionsnips
• A quick documentary about Tasmanian politics
• sharon & garrys synpse one instruction, two minds, 49 programs and we still lost the text.
• Kaye, Linda & Jason used Imageloop, easy to use but we couldn’t add sound or video - Penguins in love

I wa asked to do an impromptu short overview of tagging in del.icio.us, so I used a mixture of some prepped and unprepped material to demo some of the ways I use del.icio.us for both personal and group resource organizing / republishing.

And there was another wave of energy as the participants explored my collection of Precious Small Web Gems. By 3pm my voice was pretty much gone, and we had saturated the audience in web goodness. I’m grateful for the fabulous organzing of the event- the IT staff did an amazing job wiring and setting up networks/computers for this group on what was billed as “limited” bandwidth. And I owe a big shout-out to Nick, who drove out to the airport to deliver the Mac power supply I had left behind! Tassie truly set the pace for the start of this trip

But now I am back in Melbourne, a lovely city view room this time from the Rendezvous Hotel, and scrambling to prep my materials and my body for the next session tomorrow morning.