j's scratchpad

A colleague has once again asked me to speak to his students about finding, evaluating, and using information. My presentation is very similar to ones I’ve done in the past. He’s giving me the entire class time this year, so I’ve added some material and will probably add more. I don’t think I’ve had to speak for about two hours before, so I’ll be interested in seeing how I do.

Some of the new material will be about Wikipedia and weblogs, since there’s a lot of buzz about them in journalism circles. A reporter recommended that I say something about plagiarism, too. It seems like there’s always something major I forget.

There’s a lot of cool stuff to talk about this week, too, with the blogger getting credentials to cover the White House, the vanishing newspapers Webcast Wednesday afternoon, and the idea about whether shield laws could apply to bloggers, too.

I hope to encourage more participation from the students this year. I definitely don’t want to have to listen to me for two hours.

Yes, I’ll try to remember to bring candy. Yes, I plan to put my presentation online.

Addenum 3/9: In short, my presentation sucked eggs. It was a series of mishaps.

1. Last night, I ventured out in the horrible storm to try to buy candy for the students. It took me 1 1/2 hours to go 16 miles. When I got to the store, it was closed.
2. I had to fix two printer problems before it would print right for handouts.
3. The copier that does the nice, stapled, double-sided copies never works for me. Why I tried it tonight, I will never know.
4. I can’t convince my server to let me put the presentation online. This problem relates to the bigger issue of me being out of server space and not really knowing what to do about it. Getting more space with my current ISP doesn’t seem to be an option and I have no money right now for other options. I cleaned some stuff off the server, but it didn’t free up enough space. It also means I need to reorganize some material and kill some now broken links, but I’m too tired to deal with all of that tonight.
5. I was late to class because I was waiting for the photocopies and stapling them.
6. We made arrangements in advance to have Internet access and a cable for the projector. Neither was in the room. A student went to the tech people, who brought a projector cable. The guy told me my ethernet cable was faulty, so he left to get another one. (I know my cable works. I use it all the time.) When we plugged it in and still nothing happened, he then told me my laptop wouldn’t work because it’s not registered to work on their network. I had Internet access last year when I gave the presentation. It didn’t occur to me–or I guess to the person who made the arrangements for my presentation–that anything would have changed to prevent me having access. They apparently don’t have computer equipment presenters could use to enable them to have access to the Internet. Now, why they didn’t tell us this before I gave the presentation, I don’t know. It really hampered what I could talk about tonight. My lecture was about half as long and much more boring than it usually is. And now, of course, I really need to put it online so the students can visit the sites I would have highlighted had I been able to get online.

I think this combination of things is actually kinda funny. Murphy’s Law and all that. I opened with an annecdote about how I’ve been doing these talks and courses about blogging lately and places don’t want to give Internet access for the courses.

I’m not even going to try to mess with my server space tonight.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 5th, 2005 at 6:25 pm and is filed under News Librarianship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.