An Open Video Message To Steve Leinwand And Jerry Becker

November 29th, 2010 by Dan Meyer

Urli.st Tutorial from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

It struck me several times throughout both conferences that we need to counter-program a session across from the "Newcomer's Orientation." I'm not talking about "Rolling Your Own Backchannel with Twitter." Scale that back. Way back. Something more like, "How to Make National Presentations a Lot Less of a Chore for Presenters," featuring URL shorteners, Delicious, PDFs, basic FTP. maybe drop.io. You name it.

I wrote that, largely, on behalf of these two presenters, both of whom seemed stymied by the task of distributing resources (links, in Leinwand's case; PDFs in Becker's) to a large group.

Note the "virtual handout" solution from Leinwand:

And the paper-chair-piles from Becker:

So I created a quick tutorial introducing them to urli.st. Is there a contribution you can make to this conference pre-session?

11 Comments »

11 Responses to “An Open Video Message To Steve Leinwand And Jerry Becker”

on 29 Nov 2010 at 7:08 am1 EdThoughts

Thanks for the tip. I am presenting at a conference soon and was looking for an easy way to have links. I had thought about a quick wiki, but this will serve my purposes. Thanks again!
on 29 Nov 2010 at 12:26 pm2 Mr. K

> Is there a contribution you can make to this conference pre-session?

Use QR codes so that people with cell phones/cameras/ipads can grab your website without having to write anything down.
on 29 Nov 2010 at 8:01 pm3 John Scammell

I’ve been sharing the links from my presentations in a dropbox file. This is much easier. Thanks.

Although, several of the people I shared a dropbox link with ended up signing up for dropbox, so I’ve worked my way up to the maximum 8 GB of free storage for the referrals. That was worth a small inconvenience…
on 29 Nov 2010 at 9:21 pm4 Telannia

I suggest multurl.com and livebinders.com.
on 30 Nov 2010 at 6:16 am5 Norma Jost

Another idea is to use weebly.com.
I was preparing for a big session and a wonderful teacher suggested to post my handouts and links at weebly.com. It has worked wonderfully!
on 30 Nov 2010 at 6:17 am6 Norma Jost

Check mine out at njost.weebly.com
on 30 Nov 2010 at 6:18 am7 Kathleen

Thanks Dan. Typically at content rich conferences, our presenters, who are inspiring others, need help in the most basic of digital presentation. I’m just so pleased that you’d take the time to not only share your idea, but model through video response. I’m a huge fan of many of your ideas.
on 03 Dec 2010 at 7:44 pm8 Barbara Tallent

Thanks for the shout-out Telannia on LiveBinders. I just did a couple of sessions at different conferences and it was so great to have my handout be a little piece of paper with a url! I put everything they would ever need in a LiveBinder. The best part is that I was still updating my handout an hour before my session with great stuff that was tweeted about that morning.

The first session I did in powerpoint, but the second session I just did right out of the binder.
on 25 Jan 2011 at 12:58 am9 A Nascent Vision of Technology « Quantum Progress

[...] or tell attendees to email them if they would like more information (Dan Meyer can attest that this isn’t a phenomenon localized physicists). After years of this, my expectations is been suitably reduced to the point where I’m [...]
on 28 Apr 2012 at 8:42 am10 David Petro

URL shorteners have been around for a while and you are correct in being surprised about how few people use or know about them. I have used tinyurl.com in the past and now use bit.ly. I like bit.ly because if I create an account (free) I can track how many times people actually used the link I gave out.

One thing I have notice about using them is that in many cases people don’t quite get them. It looks so foreign that they kind of have a dear in headlights kind of reaction or sometimes they think it may be some sort of spam-ish thing. So you have to give a brief word about url shorteners.

The flip side to this is there is still a sizable portion of people that like to walk away with something in their hands.
on 28 Apr 2012 at 12:33 pm11 Jared Derksen

I never do a presentation without making a page for it at my own website. For example:
http://web.me.com/mrmathman/MrMathMan/PS_11.html

Any resources, questions or new ideas that come up during the talk are added when I get home. I hate it when a presenter gets an idea during his talk and then everyone is frantically trying to write down a URL that half the room will probably get wrong. Or the infamous “email and I promise to get back to you…” Most people are really good about getting back to their audience, actually.

But if I have one place with everything on it, life is much easier.