Philosophical question: If a presentation falls in the woods, and there is no one there, does it make a sound? Or for that matter, if you miss a conference presentation, does an abstract, a paper, or even the PowerPoint itself really provide information (worth the weight, er… wait, of the download?)

Like Jay Cross’s recently posted audio narrated ASTD presentation, we had done the same for a keynote presentation by Diana Oblinger at our May 18, 2004 Ocotillo Retreat — it is part of my compulsion to make sure we have materials from our events that can be useful afterward, and for those who were not there.

First of all, it certainly helps to have a compelling speaker, and Oblinger has done that again on a second visit in 2 years to Maricopa (see Into the Future: What is IT?, Feb 2002).

Recently named as a Vice President of EDUCAUSE, Oblinger always brings practical ideas, real examples, research data, and useful strategies tailored to meet the topics of our sessions, and to boot, always manages to deliver them as well balanced (text vs graphics) in PowerPoint as you can get. And she is so personable and enthusiastic.

Her talk for us was The Paradox of Agility and Stability— addressing the issues of the changing demographics of learners, appraches sucvh as games and simulations, trends in assessment, instituional strategies for change….

Knowing ahead of time she would be willing to provide the PowerPoint, we had set her up for the presentation with a microphone to record her audio (we just recorded it into a Canon GL/1 DV camera, just the audio). Afterward, this was digitized quickly into iMovie, and exported as .WAV files. Then it was a jump across the room to my PC to open the presentation in PowerPoint, access the Macromedia Breeze sound editing menus to import the audio, and then synchronize the slide frames with the audio. As an additional bonus, since Oblinger had provided us references for many of the data sources used in the presentation, we were able to add them as hyperlinks.