A week ago, Erin and Buffy and I met with Rosalie Pedersen at the Teaching and Learning Center to plan our event, which will take place April 14, 2010 from 12:30 to 1:50pm, during class time for our COMS 463s.

Purposes

We realized there were many purposes for the event because of the various stakeholders involved:

• 463 students are performing their presentations for a grade in COMS 463 and to showcase the work they did
• Administrators want to understand the CSL phenomenon since they don't experience it themselves
  
• Funders (including admin) need to understand the ways in which staff and money are needed to support CSL
  
• Community partners will be interested in finding out what kinds of projects they can be involved in
• Instructors are looking for profiles of their own and their colleagues' courses, and want to know how CSL can fit into a course they might be teaching.
• Interview participants want to see how they've been profiled, and are interested in how their input has become part of a larger mosaic 
  

Venue

• Our venue is a small lecture hall with tiered seating for 64 people.  It's in the Science B building, which is central on campus
  
• We needed a venue to fit our whole class of 31 people (including the instructional team) AND visitors
• We needed at least 30 seats for people we want to invite to the event.
• I was able to obtain this room for free because the presentation occurs during class time
• We also booked a reception room for 1.5 hours after the event, since another class starts in our presentation room at 2pm sharp
  

Invitations

• Erin created an invitation list with priority 1 (VIPs) and priority 2 guests.  Our priority 1 guests, mainly administrators and community partners, number 21 people. 
  
• We are asking our VIPs to reply by April 5 so that we can invite priority 2 people
• Priority 2 people include most of our instructors and interviewees. 
  
• Erin and I have been designing the invitation.  I created a vertical banner image that goes next to the text, and Erin drafted some text and I edited it, for an invitation to VIPs. 

Recording

• We decided to make an audio recording of the presentation, possibly with wireless lapel microphones. 
  
• We decided not to use Elluminate, a program that records the power point and voice and a little image all at once.  This would have required all presenters to stand stationary in front of the microphone and would reduce the drama of being able to move around while presenting.