PLA Blog

Nearly 200 people are registered to attend the PLA 2008 Virtual Conference (everyone who attends the PLA 2008 conference in Minneapolis can also log in now to participate, or later to gain access to the archives), and so far, everyone seems to be really happy with it. I was recruited to “host” the conference, which really means a cheerful welcome message at the beginning of the day and chatting with the attendees during the “Virtual Happy Hour” at the end of the day (sans cocktails, sadly). It’s been a hoot so far. The Learning Times crew has been doing an excellent job of keeping everything together and moving!

The Adobe Connect interface that the attendees see isn’t much different from the interface that the presenters see (click on the screenshots for a larger view complete with interface notes):

Here you mostly see the areas for slides and chat, but normally you could also see a floating list of attendees. Live, on-the-fly polling, white boards, co-browsing and desktop sharing is possible with the interface, so it really adds to the interactivity of the experience. So far, getting the presenters ready for their sessions has been really easy: put on the headsets, show them the interfaces, and off they go. We’ve had a few problems with streaming audio and video simultaneously, but I think that might actually be an internet connection problem in this case.

Speaking of interactivity, one of the best examples is the Inside the Author’s Studio sessions. Yesterday, Nancy Pearl donned a headset and spoke directly with Virtual Conference attendees for a full hour, taking questions directly from the audience and answering them.

Since the Adobe Connect interface can be altered on the fly to meet the needs of the presenter, Learning Times set her up with a a “Questions for Nancy Pearl” chat box that was separate from the General Chat. That way, attendees could still talk amongst themselves, and Learning Times could pass along links related to Nancy’s comments — for example, she mentions an author, they go out and find the URL of the author’s site, and post it to the chat — and Nancy could focus directly on what people were asking her.

It’s really a nice setup.

Today’s session was especially interesting, because we experienced a typical conference problem: a presenter who doesn’t/can’t show. I still haven’t heard what happened with those presenters, or what the plan is, but in a pinch they needed someone to fill a slot. Since I had mentioned the PLA 2008 Twitter experiment to the Virtual Conferencees, hoping they would also share their thoughts using the #pla08 hashtag, and there were many librarians who instantly had questions, I was called in to pinch hit with an impromptu presentation about Twitter. Overall it was really interesting, and I think most attendees got something out of it. I know I got about 12 new Followers on Twitter for my time :). It also led to a really interesting chat discussion about using Twitter and Meebo for reference, the idea of roving reference, single service points, and more, and I’m glad we recorded all of it for the archive. Who knows, maybe you’ll all see me as a future PLA presenter at some point.

Virtual Conference attendees: be sure to sound off in the comments here!