I gave my Web 2.0 tutorial for ATHENS 2006 yesterday afternoon and it was the first time I had the opportunity to teach to « real » students.
A few of them were really sleepy but the organizers had kindly warned me that their Parisian nights were pretty busy and that it was to be expected…
Most of the others looked on the contrary interested and the audience was much more friendly and participative than the typical audience of professional conferences.
They did ask a lot of questions and warmly applauded me at the end of my talk.
The content of the tutorial is really heavily technical with a lot of code snippets and HTTP traces. Its duration (three hours) is adequate and I think it has been well received even though there are at least two points that can be improved:
- I was surprised to see that in slide show mode, OpenOffice Impress didn’t show any pointer (of course that wasn’t the case when I had rehearsed on my own PC). My presentation includes a lot of links and I was not able to click on these links since I couldn’t find out when they were selected! That has been quite disturbing and I had to switch into edit mode to get the pointer back each time I wanted to follow a link. During the break, I eventually discovered that there is a slide show option to make the mouse pointer visible and that made my life much easier during the second part. That’s something I need to remember for my next presentations!
- I need to add some diagrams to visualize the exchanges between the browser and the server. There are many of them in my sample Web 2.0 application. Showing the HTTP traces is useful but some diagrams would help to understand the sequencing of actions and exchanges.
I have asked to the students to use my email address to send me their feedback and I hope they won’t hesitate to do so.
The organizers, Jacques Prévost and Didier Courtaud, seemed please enough to invite me to participate to the next edition and I should be involved in the ATHENS program again next year.