Today is my presentation at ACUBE. The first presentation I attended was about using an A-to-D system for collecting and analyzing physiological data. Next is a poster session and then my talk.
My talk went well. It is an updated version of the talk I gave at Tufts last year. I had been too busy to practice it thoroughly before I came, so parts were a bit disjointed. It turned out I was in a computer lab, so I encouraged people to actually try out a wiki too, which I hadn't planned to do and which threw me out of order a bit. But the talk seemed well received and one of the participants came up to me after the talk to say that she was planning to get her technical staff to set up a wiki for her when she got back.
One of the things that is hardest for people to understand is the lack of authentication. "Can you do that?" one participant asked, like having things password protected was some kind of natural law or something. Without authentication, the possibility of abuse exists -- I've found spam a time or two in this wiki, but relatively rarely (that someone would bother at all is actually a bit flattering). I found offensive remarks posted in the sandbox in one of my coursewikis one time. But I see it as rather like walking into a classroom and finding something offensive written on the blackboard. It is not a solution to require the chalk to be kept under lock and key. Under that circumstance, most people would just reach for the eraser without giving it a second thought.
After my talk, I went on a field trtip to a gravel river bank where there were crinoid fossils. We collected a lot of the little discs that formed the stems of crinoids and I even found a calyx -- the top of crinoid. We found a variety of other fossils as well: brachipods, bryozoans, and corals. It was nice to get outside and walk around for a bit.