[a tumbleweed slowly rolls by, nearly taking out a semicolon on its way past…]
Things have been a might bit quiet around these parts, lately. A little too quiet, if you know what I mean…
Yes, the old Confessions of a Medical Educator blog has been gathering a bit of dust while I’ve been focusing my energies on CMEpalooza. Sad. But while we’re on the subject — Hey! CMEpalooza is only one week away! Wow!
If you haven’t been following the palooza blog (spellcheck tells me “palooza” isn’t a word. YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME SPELLCHECK!!!) here are a few quick updates on how the prep is going.
- We’ve extended the palooza to a second day (I say “we” to make you think I have a staff of 20 working behind the scenes on stuff. There’s no staff. It’s just me. We’re very streamlined and efficient.). Here are the links for the March 20 and March 21 agendas.
- For the past two weeks I have been holding quick Google+ Hangout training sessions with each CMEpalooza presenter and they have proven to be well worth the time and effort involved. If you’re ever [nuts] enough to try something like this on your own, I highly recommend doing something similar. It’s helped iron out a few glitches, both self-induced (sending my first two “trainees” the wrong link to access the Hangout) and presenter-induced (usually simple things like accidentally muting the laptop or forgetting to turn on headphones).
- As I stated over on the CMEpalooza blog, I’m now 99% sure I can pull this off. Using Google+ Hangouts On Air is a good system, but not a perfect system. The audio and video quality fluctuates and isn’t always 100% in-synch. The picture can be a little jerky depending on the speed of the presenter’s internet service (I learned the hard way not to let my kids stream Netflix while I’m trying to do a Hangout. Good Luck, Charlie, indeed!). But overall, it’s pretty good and that’s my basic goal for this. I’ll be happy with “pretty good” and satisfied with “not bad”.
- Lastly — and maybe most importantly — I created a page on the CMEpalooza website (http://cmepalooza.wordpress.com/live) where you can go to watch all the presentations as they stream live. You can read more specific instructions about watching the presentations here.
Confessions of a Medical Educator 
This was a Herculean effort @theCMEguy! You’ve already surpassed “pretty good”. You’re now also the go-to guy for anyone with enough chutzpah to try this again. You are not merely a change agent, but a change leader. As are your intrepid presenters.
I will be watching as many sessions as possible wearing my custom #CMEpalooza. Maybe you can post a little something about how viewers can interact with you and the presenters during the G+ hangout? i.e., will participants be visible, are you taking questions live or in advance of each presentation, etc?
You are too kind, Greselda :-). Good idea about the blog post — I’ll put up something over on the CMEpalooza blog. Quick answers: participants are not visible; yes, questions can be asked live via the G+ Q&A app attached to the streaming videos; I hadn’t thought about people submitting questions ahead of time, but, sure, I don’t have a problem with that.