Earlier Today I Gave A Talk In Australia

This morning, as normal, I switched on my iPod Touch just after getting out of bed and downloaded tweets posted overnight. And via a tweet from Jonathan O’Donnell I discovered that during the night I had given the opening keynote talk of the day at the OzeWAI at OZCHI 2009 conference. Yes, I had given a talk at a conference held in Australia before breakfast!

As I pointed out after spotting this: “A few hours ago I gave a keynote talk at the OzeWAI conf in Australia. I was asleep at the time! #a11y http://bit.ly/6Z8AN1“. Of course this provided the opportunity for the response “so were the audience! :-)”

Later on in the day, after returning from a meeting in Birmingham I came across a tweet from Joss Winn: “42% of US data centres expect to run out of electricity by 2012. 39% will exceed cooling capacity within that period http://j.mp/8UMPXS” which highlighted a comment from a newly-published report on “Low carbon computing: a view to 2050 and beyond” by Paul Anderson, Gaynor Backhouse, Daniel Curtis, Simon Redding, David Wallom which is available from the JISC Web site.

At the recent CETIS 2009 conference Joss told me of his interests in environmental issues and his heartfelt concerns of the needs to reduce energy usage. On his blog Joss recently asked “What will Higher Education look like in a 2050 -80% +2c 450ppm world?“.

I wonder if sometime in the near future travelling to another country to deliver a talk at a conference will be regarded in the same way that lighting a cigarette in the lecture theatre would be – something that is just not done.

And as well as recycling paper will we recycle our talks? The talk which was used at today’s OzeWAI conference was a slidecast (PowerPoint slides with audio hosted on Slideshare) of a rehearsal of a talk entitled “From Web Accessibility To Web Adaptability” which I presented recently at the RNIB’s Techshare conference (and is embedded below).

Is this approach likely to become more prevalent, I wonder? And if so, what are the best practices which should be adopted – and what are the mistakes to be avoided?