My first conference presentation

From the LILAC 2013 programme

Having attended LILAC as a delegate twice, I thought it was time to attend as a presenter. Luckily, this year I'd been involved with a Jisc project investigating links between students' attitudes towards and understanding of digital literacy and how it relates to employability. One of Jisc's requirements is that we disseminate our findings and, as one of the leading international conferences on information literacy, LILAC was identified early on as a key place to do this. We thought it was important to represent the collaborative nature of the project in our presentation so I asked Federica Oradini, senior lecturer in e-learning, to co-present with me. We submitted our conference proposal (my first ever!) and crossed our fingers. We were delighted to receive the email saying that it had been accepted.

Fede and I met up a few times prior to the conference to develop the slides and decide what to prioritise. We'd submitted a short paper so we couldn't cover everything. The project manager, Fiona O'Brien, sat in on our final run through (which had some technical glitches!) and made some helpful suggestions. However, part of what we wanted to talk didn't happen until the Thursday before. This was our "Get the digital edge" day, which was one of the key outputs of the project. Some short interviews had been filmed to ask students what they'd gained from the day. Fede and I went though these the night before our presentation to pick out a few to show.

Presenting at a conference for the first time was a bit daunting so I'm glad that it was LILAC and that Fede was with me - both of those really helped. I always get nervous when speaking in public, as I'm sure many people do, but nowadays I also get a buzz out of it. The time flew by and I realised afterwards there were a few things I'd forgotten to mention. We were asked some good questions and I hope everyone who attended got something from it.

Our presentation and some photos from the session (thanks to our Chair Steve McIndoe) are below.

Project DigitISE - LILAC 2013 from University of Westminster Technology Enhanced Learning