Taking Content Mobile

Only a couple of years ago, faced with a room of students engrossed in their mobile phones, any teacher or professor could be forgiven for thinking that they’d lost the attention in the room. But recently, these devices have become essential tools for students, who are using phones, tablets and notebooks, to find research information, take notes and project manage their studies.

Students are highly mobile, resourceful and under increased pressure to gain as much as they can from their time at university.  67% of students use technology at least once an hour and 40% every 10 minutes; they are permanently connected to a universe of scholarly information through their VLE and institutional library. Their expectation is that they should be able to immediately access the information they need, and if they can’t they will substitute published information with alternative sources that are connected, including Google and Wikipedia.

Today’s student needs access, portability and immediacy of information and it’s become essential for all publishers and libraries to have a strategy that takes their content mobile.

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How to give a great vendor presentation

A couple of months back, at the London Book Fair, I arrived at the ‘digital theatres’ to see an interesting vendor presentation. The presentation was halfway through, the seats were gone and I was standing about three rows back behind some really quite tall people.

A vendor presentation at a fair is very different from a conference, where people have turned up just to see you and the hall is otherwise empty and quiet. And one of the big differences is your audience’s ability to walk away; for most of the presentations I attended I counted about 38 seats, but up to 100 standing, so keeping the attention of the people far away can really add to your audience.

As I tried, really quite desperately, to keep up with what was going on the front, I realised that there will be many vendors that never see it from this perspective. So here are some hints and tips on vendor presentations, from someone who is always late, and always standing at the back.

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