I’ve been trying for oh, the last TWO WEEKS to write a post about all the fun and glorious things I did at the OLA Superconference 2010, but I have some writer’s block or something.
So instead, I’ll discuss all the fun and glorious things I presented on, at the conference”s poster session.
Me and my buddy Angela Hamilton (Science Librarian at York), presented our lovely poster on the topic, “Why screencasting? The benefits of interactive online tutorials”. I say it’s lovely because Angela designed it and she made it look far, far prettier than anything I’d have been able to churn out. Bravo to her. 
The poster focused on our combined work creating Adobe Captivate videos, with a lit-review we did of existing articles on the topic of screencasting video use in librarians. In fact, there is a lot of interesting coverage of this topic and it informed not only the contents of our poster, but the way I approach my own video-making.
We wanted it to be interactive, so we had a laptop set up with Captivate installed, to show attendees just how easy the whole thing is. It was fun to demonstrate in about one minute how you can capture your activities on screen, and turn it into a published video. We also had another laptop set up with our finished videos running on it — videos like “How to use CINAHL” or “How to cite properly”. That was cool too, because it shows off the bell’s and whistle’s of the software, and makes us look like competent, tech-savvy lie-berrians. Which we are, of course.
If you are going to be participating in a poster session: Bring lots and lots and lots of handouts. Why do people love the handouts so much? They were like, stealing them right off the table. We ran out. Lesson learned: More handouts. We had about 40 and that wasn’t enough.
