Webinar Reflection

Webinar Performed

My group wondered what there is to be learned about users' copyright in social media. My original interest was in proper attribution when sharing through a social service, but the topic morphed into "protecting your own copyright on social media services." It turns out that when the product is you, what you put into the service becomes part of the service. We discovered, when we put our three independently-researched sections together, that our webinar was in danger of being repetitive; in the case of social media, the terms of service you sign grant that service a license to proliferate anything you post and use it in any way they might see fit in relation to the service. I think we did a decent job catching this and differentiating the focus of our sections, but in the future, structural planning should take place once more information has been collected.

We did our best to hold attention and encourage a bit of involvement with some token questions and chat interaction. Our slides weren't spectacular, though; we had more than a handful that were simply text, and even some screen grabs of more blocks of text. It took seeing a few webinars to realize that the general presentation worry of flipping through slides too quickly might not be so applicable here; when your audience is staring at a screen and not you, your animation can come through in what you show them. In my section, I used a bubble metaphor in my descriptions that would have made a nice visual, and been a break from all the text.

We learned a trick from one of the first groups presenting that was very handy toward the end; rather than wait for a long, silent stretch for someone to think of a question, we made up "write-in" questions to help us casually wrap up our takeaways.

Webinars Attended

I learned about enticing boys into the library, supporting school communities affected by budget cuts, reaching patrons outside of social media, and creative commons licenses. All were very interesting and informative, and I enjoyed the casual classroom effect I felt during the presentations.

I found that some groups didn't quite realize that visual appeal is important in holding the audience's attention; some slides had more text than those of my own group, and I found myself quickly finding other things to look at after realizing that each slide lasted for a few minutes of talking. Others did a wonderful job of finding interesting and relevant visuals to show me, which I appreciated.

I found myself wishing for subtitles in some cases. It's difficult to understand some of the heavier accents in our class; I'm wondering if not being able to see the speaker has an impact on my ability to identify their words?

Overall, it seems that there are some subtleties that my original assessment of "webinars are just long-distance one-shot workshops" glossed over. I realize that I learned about a few of these issues when discussing distributed computer-assisted cooperation last semester. People interact differently through screens; I wonder how different these webinars would have been if we hadn't spent a semester of class together?