Last week's Water Meeting is an example of everything that can be wrong! Very high ceiling in a big room with all hard surfaces, lots of glass. Multiple speakers, so having them use my mic didn't seem to be a very good idea. The speakers either had NO Powerpoint or a very basic one that just hit the most important points. All the speakers had problems making the PowerPoint move to the next slide when it was supposed to. Due to the high ceiling, the mic the speakers used had echos and feedback. One of the "facilitators" read somewhere that it will energize the crowd to do exercises where everyone moves around, all talking as they do so. At least I wasn't the only one who failed to hear which direction we were to move next...The entire room was full of confused people stumbling around, trying to hand off the paper they had to the right person. Some people had three papers, while others had none. Meanwhile, the person with the mic tried to shout over all the noise.

The various work groups (which meet far more often) are generally a dozen people or less. The mic I bought is supposed to work if placed in the center of the table for small groups. I'm going to try it out during lunch tomorrow at the lecture series--each table seats eight people, and I've learned to just quietly eat my lunch and smile from time to time because it's impossible to hear in a room with several tables of people talking. In the past, sometimes I've just skipped lunch and gone for a walk.

The mic I just got is supposed to work with the Android tablet I bought for Live Transcribe. The tablet itself simply doesn't have a very good mic, plus you need to hold it upright in order for it to pick up anything. Initially, I thought that speech-to-text apps might be THE solution, but using them means I miss seeing what people are saying, their attitudes, etc. It certainly isn't like TV with closed captioning where you're watching the person speaking with the captions in the same space! (Not that we have much of that, as only one channel, which shows old programs, has captions. Really makes me cranky to hear that such-and-such company paid for the closed captioning on something I'm watching when it doesn't offer captions at all. I'm sure that problem is all good ol' Charter.)