MERLOT presentation — the gory aftermath

We just gave our dog and pony show on RSS at the MERLOT conference. Previously, I had always tacked on a five minute spiel on weblogs and RSS to the end of “learning object” talks (and always sensed the most interest there). So it was thrilling to be able to focus on this stuff for an entire talk. The audience seemed very keen, and we had a number of people come up to us at the end saying they intended to try using and implementing RSS and weblogs when they returned back to their jobs.

It helped that Alan and D’Arcy are such articulate and amusing presenters. Though we have been collaborating off and on for some time, this conference was the first time we had all met in person. What I find interesting is that the impressions I’d had about their personalities from their weblogs, email and iChat turned out to be so close to the way they are in real life. There really weren’t too many surprises… it felt like we were old friends picking up where we had left off. What a groovy couple of guys… I hope this isn’t the end of our work together.

[Speaking of hooking up with bloggers, thanks to all for making our beer session so much fun — unlike Scott, I don’t really remember much blog talk… I was pleasantly surprised that we spent so much time talking about more general topics. Anyhow, I hope these meetups evolve into a conference tradition, I had a blast]

Our presentation materials and links are available if you are interested (the “What’s the fuss” wiki is the most comprehensive resource). Alan did an awesome job building out a couple of fictional scenarios of Lora and Boris working with this stuff for the PowerPoint presentation. Hopefully soon we won’t need to cite fictional faculty members (though if that comes to pass, I’ll kind of miss our virtual friends).