 I've just turned on the recording, so we'll get ourselves under way. For those of you who've just come and joined the room, my name is Mark Brown. There's a picture of me there actually in the conference venue, and I am the conference chair. So in this case, we've run a few other webinars where a couple of my colleagues have facilitated them. In this case, you're talking to the chair, so if I can't answer your question, then you might be a bit concerned or I'll at least have some attempt to be able to answer your questions. What we have planned is just sort of three bits, but primarily this is really about responding to any questions you might have. There is a chat box that you're able to use. I'm conscious that some of you may not be familiar with Zoom. If you can find the chat box and you want to write a question there, then I've got that open on my screen so I can either respond or just note it and talk about the questions as they fit into what I've got planned here. I want to start very briefly and just give you a bit of a sense of the venue because preparing your presentation, it always helps to know the type of venue you're in. In part that was just in case there were a few late comers, because the real thing I suspect that most of you are here for is just to hear about the presentation guidelines. As I said, respond to some of your questions, some of the logistics. At the very end, I have a few suggestions for you. We have something coming out shortly further. I don't want to, in probably a very English and Glow Saxon expression, teach you how to suck eggs here, but if you are not as experienced as a presenter, there are just some things that are useful. To be honest, even as a quite experienced presenter, it's helpful to remind yourself of these because you can get into some bad habits. Without further ado, the one, I guess, overriding message I want to leave with you, and it's not one that I'm known to practice very well personally, but the audience never complained of a presentation or speech that ended up being too short. In fact, you could almost say that's probably relevant to this webinar as well. So I'll try not to take too long and we'll get right to the key part of the purpose of the webinar. Ultimately also, when I said that you will have some tips that we'll be sharing with you via email and maybe at the end of this discussion, you will have your own tips. And so whilst you're listening to me, I hope we can have a bit of conversation, but I am focused very much on trying to give you some information about the conference. Feel free to drop in your best tip in the chat box so others can share from your experience. So that's a thought for you as I am doing most of the talking to start with at least. And as I said, if anyone has just arrived, put those questions in the chat box all by all means, feel free to turn your microphone on and ask a question, interact with me, it's no problem whatsoever. So without further ado, this is just a very brief sort of warming up as much as anything for me, as much as it is for you. A little bit about the venue. I haven't really got time to ask you all individually as to whether you've been to Dublin, kindful of the audience that will probably listen to this webinar. So I'll just talk a little bit about the fact that we have two real events going on, the pre-conference event. There's an arrow on the bottom of the screen which points to where the Dublin Conventures Centre is. That's the main conference centre right on the Liffey, really in the heart of Dublin. But the pre-conference event is at one of Dublin City University's campuses. We have three academic campuses and it's at the campus that's closest to the city. And the Google map there is just showing you that it is quite walkable. I personally do that walk on a number of occasions and you can really do it in about 30 minutes depending upon where you start and Google is a bit forgiving in terms of speed. But most people will probably grab a taxi on the Sunday. I won't talk too much about the pre-conference because I'm not sure if many of you have registered for that. We've got very strong registrations for the pre-conference event. Here's just a little bit about the St Patrick's campus. It's primarily the home of our Institute of Education and education at Dublin City University is a very strong discipline. We have about four and a half thousand education students covering from early childhood right through to adult education. And this was historically home of the St Patrick's College of Education, a very famous College of Education in Ireland that's now part of the university but the campus also has other activities as well. So enough said about that, but it will be a great pre-conference with I think probably around close to 200 people will probably be participating in the various events. And if you are interested in any of the pre-conference events, jump in and register for those now. There are only 25 euro in some cases for doctoral students there, they're less and the doctoral research on POSEM has been extended to the full day because of a shared demand of over 50 registrations. Dublin itself as I've already indicated with the Google Map and the Convention Centre, you can see the Convention Centre there lit up in the bottom in blue, right on the river, on the river, sorry. And it's really an iconic venue for us. It's Europe's one again, Europe's award is the best meeting and conference centre for 2019. If you're already familiar with Dublin then this is a bit hoha. So nonetheless, this is the sort of iconic shop that you'll get at night. One would hope that that's what we'll get in November. It shouldn't be too cold, but it won't be as warm as it is now. Good to see some of those tips coming through in the chat box too. Here's how when you enter the Convention Centre, so it's very modern. It's pretty much a state-of-the-art facility. Here's a view from the level that we will be on for the conference, the whole conference will be on one level, level one. I'll show you a map in a second. So some great views of Dublin as well. So the Convention Centre has, I think it has three levels, is it there? If you count the ground level and as I said, the whole conference will be on level one. That gives you a little bit of an insight, and whilst it's without the context perhaps not that helpful, at least that floor plan there shows you the number of sort of breakout rooms we have, and I'll just touch on those briefly, because some of you will be no doubt scheduled in quite large rooms, and others might be in quite small rooms. A little bit of the luck of the draw, but actually more around the interest in the theme, how many speakers and other things which I can elaborate on. Just to give you a sense, that'll be the main plenary space. As an example, there'll be quite a hopefully active exhibition space because ultimately whilst giving a presentation is important at a conference, it's really about meeting and talking with people, and we've designed the conference with that in mind as much as possible. Here's one of the larger rooms to give you a presentation in. Perhaps a bit scary if you've only got 10 people in the room. We hope that that's not the case, and we certainly have a good-sized number of registrations at this point, so we would expect the conference to have at least 800 delegates. Probably more time will tell over the next few weeks. One of the other rooms, something I'll point out shortly, but make sure you develop your slides in 16.9 resolution, or ratio, actually, to be more accurate. If that doesn't mean anything, I can answer and elaborate, but you can see that the venue is laid out with all of the latest technology and has technical support in each room. It's one of the advantages of using this kind of facility. Just another one of the rooms, slightly smaller. Smaller again, and then right down to quite small, where you probably only have a capacity of about 25. So I hope there will be some logic in the way that we schedule people, and some rooms will be better for discussion than others. That's probably all I wanted to do just briefly to give you a little insight, because that's not really that helpful in terms of designing your paper, but hopefully having a sense of the footprint, the type of room you're in, and obviously one of the tips, seeing that there are a couple of tips there, it's always helpful to be in the room before you talk, if only to test your presentation, but just to get a sense of what the room is like and whether you need to be podium-bound or not, hopefully the latter. Of course, at the end of the day, there's no convention there with that kind of view, and hopefully none of the famous Dublin soft drain. So I'll stop just briefly and see if there's any questions, either in the chat box, or if you want to turn your microphone on, otherwise we'll get straight into talking about the presentations themselves. No problem if you haven't got a microphone. Hopefully you can find the chat box, but if not, no one's signalling one way or the other, we'll continue because I'm conscious of really giving you as much information and as short a possible time. So moving on, if my screen will work, one of the great joys of doing a webinar, there we go, the presenter guidelines. So this is really, I think, the heart of what we wanted to share with you today. And there are a couple of things as you saw on the orientation slide, the outline slide that we wanted to cover here. Firstly, to give you a sense that the conference has a pretty large and wide variety of paper offerings. In total, we almost had 700 submissions. At the moment, there are 577 papers under the different categories that are identified there. One of the great challenges we've had, because we know by the number of volume of emails that people are itching to hear you will be presenting your particular paper. And if you haven't done so already, you can email Judy at Hatnings, her contact details. Hatnings is the event management company we're working with to put your request in. We have a long spreadsheet of requests for people with different travel requirements and the like. One of the challenges and the aim is to have that ready today. I suspect it will be more like Monday. The full program is with people coming from over 50 countries and a large number of those delegates requiring visas. We've needed to just wait to see that we get visa confirmation because otherwise the program could change many times before it actually gets to being a little bit more stable. And we feel there was much value in letting you know about your particular date for your talk or time if then it suddenly changes and changes and changes again. We're just managing that as well as making sure that people have confirmed their registrations. The aim is to get that information of the full program on the website and email to you as soon as possible. Also on the paper submissions and generally about presenter guidelines, you're going to be receiving an email today. We would have liked it to have gone out earlier in the week but we've just been holding off because there's one little crucial piece of information we're waiting for the venue for us in the email with our presenter guidelines. Only two minutes before I started this talk, I just checked to see whether we had had those particular issue resolved. I understand we'll hear within the hour. So you should be getting, if you've put a submission in, you should be getting an email today with quite detailed notes around your presentation guidelines. So this is really just intended to give you a snapshot of those and give you a sense of what you're part of at this fairly large international conference. So I'm going to work through from the full papers down to the virtual papers. Some of you, again, if you've got questions, jump in because you might not all be presenting or I doubt very much presenting each of the categories. But this is an example of the PDF that you'll get along with the email and detailing information about your full paper. In the case of full papers, to highlight a few things, one of the great challenges, of course, is you would probably want 30 minutes if you caught it in an ideal scenario, but it's just not possible when we have 11 breakouts, 10 running in parallel and with so many papers. So it is a limit of 20 minutes. That's inclusive of question time. We're not stipulating too precisely that you must stop at 15 minutes, but we will say that our session chair and every session will have a chair who will have had briefing notes and will have met before the conference. They will stop you after 20 minutes because it's unfair on other delegates. The one thing that's really important if not the sub-theme because most of the papers will be linked into one of the sub-themes. Sometimes those themes are a little artificial and on occasions we've decided actually so we don't silo the sub-themes have some integrated sessions quite deliberately, but the thing I think I would want to really emphasise in your talk is to come back in some way whether it be at the introduction or at the end or both to the overarching conference theme of transforming lives and societies. It's very easy with the new technologies we have to sometimes lose sight of the end purpose we might have in mind and those of you might be familiar with some of my talks. I often borrow a quote saying and I could use anything here but in this case I'll use online learning. Online learning should be in the service of big ideas. It's not the big idea itself and so this conference very much is focused around the big ideas associated with what we can do with new technologies and education. A very close association and link with the sustainable development goals and I can tell you a little secret now that next week we'll be announcing that UNESCO has formally partnered with the conference because of that link. As I've said previously slides best put in 16.9 ratio what that means is the oblong size elongated widescreen you might call it and for full papers you don't need to send us your slide deck once you can install that as in a venue like this they're very well set up but it does need to be installed at the presenter desk you can't just go and install it on to the computer in the room because everything's networked and they just won't get you to do that so that's one of the downsides because you may want to tweak your talk if you're a little later in the conference still no problem doing that but probably wise to install it on the first day and if you do want to make a few changes because you've seen something that someone else has talked about then you just go and update it we're asking you it's not essential because we will do this but you will have all been given a paper submission number and then just end that with in this case full paper or depending on your the nature of your presentation obviously test your presentation in advance be careful about using any non-standard fonts that's sometimes a trap that you can fall into because the machines they will be PCs rather than Macs I'm a Mac user myself there's a little trick that you learn over the years that generally means everything comes across but I'm telling you probably as I said earlier the suckings if you don't understand the importance of testing your presentation every room will have a clicker and that means I would strongly encourage you not to be stuck behind the podium you can walk around the room depending on the size that certainly helps with a level of interactivity and connection with your audience so moving on to concise papers there's nothing coming through at this point in questions there's not a lot different for me to say you may see there because of the number of people we have coming in particular from parts of the developing world that just emphasises the conference is in English I guess that's one of the downsides we're in Europe and part of being in Europe is being multi-lingual we'll have a number of student ambassadors throughout the conference who will at least be able to speak more than one language but just as you can appreciate for an international conference we are asking people to converse in English not much different on this slide other than a concise paper is what it says concise 15 minutes in total if I was designing I would probably be and now suggestion to you for a slide deck for 10 minutes and leave time for questions and discussion of course people choose to take the full 15 minutes and that might not actually be the best value for your paper because coming to a conference is not just presenting it's about making the links and connections of those in the audience for the follow-up conversations in fact it would be a very expensive exercise if all you were doing is coming to the conference to talk for 15 minutes and that was it 15 minutes is a mechanism for you as I see it to really get your work known in a short time so that you can follow up those conversations with the people who have an interest elsewhere and in this case at the world conference so it may not be the audience as small that you might be used to in a European sense or whether it be or you're from down under don't think there's much more I need to add here unless there's any questions coming through lightning talks will be a very interesting format might be quite challenging for some people so just take a couple of minutes to elaborate because as you saw we have quite a large number of lightning talks this concept of the lightning talk is going to be drawing on what I've described in the Presenta Guidelines as an infamous Irish tradition known as Gaster and I've just acknowledged Dr Tom Farley from Chirili for his work in making this quite famous here in Ireland the term Gaster is really for a very quick, clever, smart snappy presentation in fact just summarising if you're not familiar with this already just five minutes you're going to be back to back with probably no more than ten in a session our intention is to record these so they're available and you also get the opportunity for a much bigger echo in terms of your presentation the snappy pace you'll probably have a clock counting down on the screen and so it's a little bit a version without wanting to make this sound like it's entertainment it's your version of a dragon's den approach to doing a pitch really quick overview of what you're involved in but very much again with this view that it's a chance for you to get others who might be working in the same place give them the opportunity to come and talk with you later and in this case as I said by way of the echo I'm going to mention that towards the end in a few more minutes the opportunity of coming to a conference goes well beyond the short five minutes if you're clever about how you maximise and it will be strict timekeeping and in this case most importantly because of some of the logistics associated we're putting everything together on the computers in advance we are asking for your lightning talks before the conference a little bit of regal room there but it really is important for us to be able to make sure they all work and they can go back to back without much delay many slides we make a suggestion of maybe no more than 12 slides if you think about five minutes 30 seconds a slide we're not going to be hard and faster enforcing that but that's a pretty important consideration because otherwise you will be asked to stop halfway through your presentation if you're not careful there is a question there with regard to font size and use of images I do have some suggestions we're probably only a couple of minutes away from the slide I have about that so let me just move on to the digital posters because I think issues around size and font use apply for all of the style of presentations it's actually the digital posters that have been holding us up from sending this information to you we're taking a little bit of a risk I think this is a new format that the convention centre have never used before you'll be getting some information about us shortly about our commitment to sustainability the convention centre itself was the world's first sustainably built convention centre so we do see the digital posters as an opportunity to be a little more sustainable practically so you don't have to bring a poster with you you most definitely don't have to bring a printed poster and then to walk the talk on respects of digital learning or digital technologies you can see the photo there of the photo board you'll get that if you submitted a poster in the guidelines as well everyone over the course of the conference with a poster will be assigned a time to be able to be available by their poster those times are run throughout the day over the four days of the conference again we'll be scheduling to work around your commitments if you've made those known to us we'll do our best I have to say I can't say we'll do that perfectly and then in this case the file type needs to be a JPEG and if you have any problems whatsoever in preparing your digital poster we've prepared a template poster in PowerPoint so all you need to do when you receive that I expect it to come later today is effectively get rid of the content in it file size and just add your own content you'll see it's in portrait size no animation or videos unfortunately the technology doesn't have the ability to play those you'll find they probably won't animate and again we need the posters given they're only a one JPEG document before the conference because this is not as simple as just plugging a USB stick into the side of the poster board we have to do that through the convention centre's network and a similar naming convention so I think my next slide here I want to go before I get to the more generic points about size and other suggestions virtual papers you will have seen we have about 20 or so I wouldn't be surprised to see us have more virtual papers in part this is our commitment to sustainability it's the first time virtual papers have been used at this conference but also we're very conscious that not everyone has the funding to be able to come to such a major conference as this it's not a cheap conference I'm sure you're aware of that it's not a conference I should add as an aside that it'll be making any profit from the activity in fact probably the opposite but nonetheless the virtual paper is our effort to walk the talk because it's a little ironic that we're having a conference about online learning and we all had to come to be in one location I won't elaborate on the virtual papers now partly because of time and partly because there's a little bit of detail still to come there and I don't want to give people the wrong information but the virtual papers we hope will be a nice addition to the conference and we're committed to trying to really integrate virtual papers and virtual participants as much as possible in today's age with the back channel and social media and the conference app it shouldn't matter that you're not on site so before I give you lastly then before I give you those little tips from my perspective about how you prepare a good presentation some basic things and talk about importance of font size and the like you may have seen in the conference newsletter this week and if you haven't seen the newsletter it's available from the conference website or Twitter or our LinkedIn it's full of lots of information coming out fortnightly and there's an archive on the website under the news link this week we just published what we hope are some very light guidelines for your rights and responsibilities as a conference delegate or participant not everyone I should add has taken kindly to these it might be a little overly PC or corporate but we did a Twitter poll earlier in the week and generally speaking we hope to see this as just something to make explicit and we hope that people will enter into the spirit in part because we have social events that involve alcohol and we also have a number of delegates coming from parts of the world where alcohol is not something they drink or indulge in we just wanted to remind people about the importance of respecting other people's viewpoints and embracing diversity enough said I'm going to push on without right there for questions because the questions that are there at the moment apart from the one just come through about the app I'll touch on shortly just some of those presentation suggestions this is by no means an exhaustive list though would need many slides for this but I do do a lot of presentations and I wouldn't say I'll always get it right so even I when I went and did a Google search to find some tips to prepare to go into this to think about that more and the first thing less is more is that point I started with that's a really tough one because you really find it hard not to put that slide not to put that key point in for full papers you know what it's in the full paper so you don't need to say it all really what you want to do and I work my whole academic career around threes what are the three main points that you can make keeping it simple because if you've got more than three main points most people can't remember more than the three I certainly don't have ability to do that so hanging it around your three key main points and then this is a matter of personal style not everyone from an academic tradition would agree with what I'm about to say but increasingly like the movement in the field that we work in or to using visual images of one form or another or metaphors you know what you don't really need that list of bullet points you just need an image to trigger you for the points because you know you'll work well sometimes those bullet points of the list is for you not for your audience they don't necessarily need the bullet points and if you're using them as your speech notes then it's really the wrong use of a presentation medium again might be disrespectful to say practice your timing but for those of you who have concise papers in particular or lightening talks that's pretty crucial and in some respects saying less can actually be much more impactful the more you say I'm in danger of doing this here the less it is easy to see what your central thesis is and what those three key points might be some of you will want to show some of your initiatives your innovations, new websites that you've developed I would be strongly encouraging you to do those as screenshots or embedded videos if you really want to get a little more high tech depending on how much time you have it is a recipe a bit like saying don't use children and animals in shows a recipe for disaster if you're trying to do a live demo you might be in all the rooms but Murphy's Law and in this case it probably act I use that expression here in Ireland usually applies I mentioned previously about just try not to stand behind the podium actually one of the some things I've seen we've got a few women here listening with out wanting to sound disrespectful or stereotypic I always think that podium designers must be men because they are typically quite high occasions where I have seen and not only women are short so please be forgiving with that comment but it's awful when you see someone hidden behind a podium especially sometimes when they're so huge so just something to be mindful of what we've suggested in the written notes that you're going to receive is because question time is so tight you might want to be proactive here and end with the question usually it's a cliche I know but there will be more questions and answers as a consequence of your presentation so maybe leave that question out there for people to pick up on for the brief discussion and the follow-up discussion rather than have someone typically make a statement afterwards and not a question that perhaps others in the audience would want to or delegates would want to then think about our chairs will be queued up to try to avoid as much as possible by asking people to ask questions not just make statements unless they're really important and then the last point and then I'll come back to some of the things in the chat box here that I've got to share with you is as I've already said we're very conscious of the cost of being like this in fact you'll also be receiving from us some of our commitments that we've tried to design the conference around dimension sustainability but one of these is about making the conference as impactful as possible but you have a role too so by all means we know that if you put your slides up on some place beforehand and you can link out through the conference app or via Twitter or what other channel you may want to use because people in the conference will probably have lots of different back channels put your slides up there first make sure you know people that they're there afterwards obviously tweet tell people what room you're going to be talking why they might come to your presentation you know your title makes a big difference but if you haven't got a title that's quite what you think is going to generate the crowd tell people why it is that they should be in the room at the certain time because you've got something really important to say and the conference doesn't end when your presentation ends and you go out of that room you've got a job to do so you go up and talk to those people who also ask questions so if there's one tip that I would have for any presenter is it's too often thinking that your presentation is just during the presentation time itself and really the conference is about that networking opportunity and the presentation is the way for you to get to a wider audience of people that you might not know otherwise I'll stop on that note and just take a quick look here some of the things that have come through so yes there will be a conference app assume people will be able to access the papers through this beforehand absolutely and for the full papers there are about 140 of those 145 I think if I recall that slide earlier all of those full papers 3 or 4000 words will be available before the conference they'll be available through the app we're actually just working our way through making sure that they are of the quality that we would expect and they will all be published post the conference as well in a form that has academic standard for those that need that for their institutional purposes and being run sometimes for just promotion purposes will there be a speaker view on the PC at the podium you will have as I understand it it's a good question I actually have a site visit on Monday as I understand it the computer will be a laptop that will give you the laptop view and then you'll have the screen so you'll have both those views but that's an important consideration for those of you who are standing there and you need that little prompt and to know what's coming next so that's a very good question I wouldn't advise you to use the notes function necessarily because without knowing the setup in the room and small amount of time you're probably better to have those on a hard copy if you need them the conference app we're just working on that right now but we expect the app will be available from about two weeks prior to the conference I always have mixed feelings about conference app sometimes I don't bother at all so if we can't ensure that the information about the app and the opportunities for you to converse in the app are meaningful then we'll have failed one of our commitments so I'll put that out there and see how well we live up to it of course we're constrained by the design of conference apps and perhaps that's an area that still needs a little bit more work but of course the back channel by Twitter and other social media is just as important Twitter stream will be integrated into the app I'll see what I've got next here when I was just doing a little prep for this I then just reminded myself there's a heap of information by Google or whatever whatever search you want to use and Ted they have this really quite nice set of talks around how to give a persuasive talk I guess the reason to do this is beyond the conference itself and in my own talks I'm increasingly trying to think of metaphors more engaging ways that I can live an impact with the audience something that they go away still thinking about because that's usually my measure of success not the level of questions but have I got people thinking have I got them thinking in a way they may not have been prior to the conference so without much further ado I've really come to the end of what I have prepared here we'll see if there's anything else come through by way of your best tip I hope you've been able to follow the chat box there but I'm just scrolling down to see what else people have to say really nice point there at the start someone saying ask your audience what they want to know when you first start that's a basic principle of teaching who is in your audience what they're interested in of course that has to be balanced with depending on the length of your talk but sometimes less again is more a bit of a cliche and sometimes the question is the answer I said that previously so knowing what the questions are you're able to feed off that and we've even made the suggestion in the guidelines that you know what it would be very refreshing not to have any slides whatsoever obviously that's because you can enhance your presentation with some slides there's no doubt about that I'll stop talking see if anyone wants to use the microphone or put a question in the chat but there's probably lots I haven't shared lots I could have answered if we had perhaps even more people but you will be getting that information it's quite detailed as you will see so I would encourage you to read that well before and start preparing your presentation slides and any questions my email is available it's not that hard to find anyone and I'm pretty responsive you will find because our team here at Dublin City University and the National Institute for Digital Learning one of our commitments is to do everything possible to ensure that this is a great conference of course what we mean by a great conference could be debatable depending upon your perspective we're putting as much evident to the social programme as we are into the academic programme because ultimately it's the people that will make the conference so I'll stop talking see if anyone wants to talk otherwise it's pretty much a wrap yeah there's a question there this came up actually in an email yesterday about connecting with others for accommodation for shared accommodation the response to an email through yesterday was that we did suggest they may at this point want to use some of the social media channels of the conference that might be a bit risky for someone but we're actually very constrained in Europe if you're not in Europe under what's known as the GDPR so our data protection rules mean that we can't share with you any information about other delegates who might be looking what we might think about over the weekend to see if there's a way or if you've got an idea by all means email me a way of putting some kind of closed conversation where someone can put on a board that they're interested in finding and sharing accommodation Dublin is as expensive as London in many respects now that said there are a range of accommodation options if you haven't already done so you may want to have a look at DCU's own website where we offer accommodation it's just a little bit far from the conference every day but then again there are good transportation networks in Dublin buses everywhere and if you're saving 100 or so euro a day then you probably don't mind spending 2 or 3 euro on a bus and getting up a little earlier lots of Airbnb options bread and bread breakfast options but of course sharing that cost was not a silly idea so hopefully you appreciate we can't share any individual details but what we'll think about over the weekend is a mechanism we can use to facilitate a board of some kind where people can let others know that they're interested in sharing and willing to share so that was a good question just because again the cost of this conference and accommodation for the period is not insignificant any other thoughts or questions that I didn't answer please do email me I take a lot of personal responsibility with the team that we have here in putting on a really great event something that's going to not just be over 4 days in November or if you're coming beforehand for the pre-conference but also that really at this time in the field of online learning open distance blended forms of education together gives us a chance to really shape the future and I say that quite seriously because we have audience of policy makers and politicians whom we need to help better understand the opportunities but also some of the threats we face and the conference will certainly be designed to engage in healthy debate about where we go in the future so on that note have a good day and we look forward to seeing you all in November if not before Thank you