Making Killer Presentations

Too often when students give slideshow presentations they waste everyone's time. 

There, I said it.

Now, this is partly due to poor presentation techniques ("death by PowerPoint"), but mostly due to our changing information environment and evolving learning methods. So, even a very good presentation by past standards may not be good anymore.

In short, when we can all access a wealth of information on any topic, why would we put up with it being rehashed (often less adequately) in class? When we know that active and participatory learning beats more passive modes, why would we tolerate any format that is essentially an info monologue?

I want to do three things in this post: evaluate the relative evil of the slide show presentation format; introduce a great resource for avoiding "death by PowerPoint"; and finally, recommend four components for a killer presentation.

Let me quickly add that a killer presentation may not in fact be the best vehicle for the teaching or learning that is needed. But if we do use them, then let's use them well. 

Tools for Collaboration

A basic activity of the digital age is self organizing using readily available (often free) online tools and social media. In terms of digital literacy, to take needed action in the world we must have tools to CONSUME information; CREATE content; and CONNECT with others. Tools will vary over time in their utility, but whatever suite of tools you have, make sure they help you in those three areas. I want to focus briefly on the last of these, CONNECT.


Obviously by requiring our students to use Google+ and to post links there to their blogs, this enables connecting (as well as consuming and creating). But as one starts to move into collaborating on presentations or on projects, Google+ is not enough. Here is a short list of essential collaboration tools that we recommend:

The Open Movement on Seven Fronts

Below I have briefly listed seven different fronts of the open movement that are very active today.

Openness is a core component of digital civilization. And when I say "core component" I mean it is as central as voting is to democracies, as foundational as silicon is to computing, and as game-changing as books have been to education. But openness is not a given. In fact, it has a long, uphill battle against entrenched interests in business, politics, publishing, and education. A lot of people resist the open movement -- often without actually understanding anything but its apparent threat to their status quo. Others blithely advocate for openness as though it were the 21st century equivalent of 1960s counter culture. "Open" sounds attractively liberal or liberating. And it is. But of course, it is not so simple as a slogan.

We need to know what "open" is and what it means. If not, we can become subject either to cultural fads or to devastating business or political practices. At the very least, anyone who cares about how education can succeed in the 21st century must come to terms with how openness can scale educational opportunity for individuals and whole nations.

And so, building here upon work done by David Wiley, a national leader in the open content movement, who is currently teaching "Introduction to Openness in Eduction" at BYU, I have curated a list of seven fronts upon which the battle for openness is being waged. Following the list, I have embedded two video playlists (one from YouTube; one from Vimeo). These videos will give you a quick introduction to the issues (and to some of the important people) in the open movement:

Stifling Innovation

Created by Jessica Duensing for opensource.com

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It's purpose is to encourage disclosure of innovations in return for the exclusive right to practice the invention for a period of time.  Like any other property, a patent can be sold, transferred, or abandoned.  The typical justification for patent law is that it encourages inventions to be made public; without this protection an inventor would be likely to keep the invention secret, with the possibility that the idea would be lost once the patent holder died.

In the software industry, however, patents are generally regarded as stifling innovation.  Software patents are often granted for technology that is considered obvious, such as the infamous "One-Click" patent granted to Amazon for an online shopping cart.  The U.S. Patent Office often lacks the expertise to be able to review patents based on advances in highly specialized fields of Computer Science, letting through patents where prior art should invalidate them.  Large companies buy up huge portfolios of patents to squelch competition from smaller companies or to protect themselves against lawsuits from other large companies.  Patent "trolls" purchase patents without any intention of creating a product based on the patent, but for the sole purpose of suing other companies that may infringe on the patent.  Lawsuits are often threatened for any remotely related technology, in the hopes that a large settlement and subsequent licensing revenue can be received.

Consuming Content via Google Reader

Learning to throttle one's information stream is a key trait of digital literacy (under the category we call "consume"). Finding lots of blogs and websites isn't hard, but it is not efficient to go checking those websites routinely. It is easier to use a "feed reader" or news aggregator to bring all of those content streams to you, much like you receive email. Enter Google Reader. This is not the only feed reader available, but it is a very good one and is tied in well with other Google products such as Gmail and Google+.  (More on that below)

I also love Google Reader because it can be used on any device and can be accessed through a large variety of software clients. On the web I simply go to reader.google.com. But on my iPad I read my Google Reader feeds via Feedler and Flipboard. On my iPhone I use Byline -- all of those simply accept my Google credentials and synchronize perfectly across programs and devices. I find it very easy to stay current with all of my students blog posts by checking my Google Reader in these various ways.

I have created the following tutorial to walk people through how to set up Google Reader to follow, read, and manage feeds from a set of blogs or websites. If you have ideas for better practices of consuming using Google Reader (or another feed reader), please chime in on the conversation. 

One thing I failed to mention in the video is how well you can use Google Reader with Google+. (This brings together the "consume" and "connect" parts of digital literacy.) When reading an item in a feed, one can click on the +1 at the bottom of that item, which then gives you the option of sharing that item with any of your Google+ circles. Try it!

Ten Tips for Academic Blogging

An academic blog isn't like other types of blogs. It isn't a Mommy blog, nor a political blog, nor a personal diary blog. It is a blog devoted to developing and sharing ideas. However, at the same time, an academic blog is not an academic paper. Student bloggers must balance their posts between less and more formality in what they post.

Here are 10 suggestions. Most of these are tips for good blogging in general, but toward the end the tips are more focused on academic sorts of blogging.

Notable Posts from DigiCiv Students

Blogging is a flexible medium, and as a new set of students gets accustomed to it, I think it would be helpful for them to know what we see as valuable in posts that have been created to date.


Posting or linking to prior academic work
Bryan Mulkern posted a paper he wrote about Jackson Turner's frontier thesis to contribute to a discussion of manifest destiny. Similarly, Brett Riley, as a follow up to class discussion, paraphrased a paper he'd written last semester about publishing and linked to his bibliography. Marcos Escalona, chiming in the copyright debate, also referred to a prior paper he'd written on the topic.


Posting critically
Not to encourage people simply to be contrary, but I admire when students have the courage to make reasoned cases contrary to popular opinion or to the explicit bias of the instructors. Both Brian Robison and Michelle Frandsen opposed open science (Brian: "Open Science and Why its a Bad Thing"; Michelle: "Open Science vs. Good Science"). David Perkins swam upstream with his "Three reasons why I stayed off the anti-SOPA bandwagon" as well as his post on why the Internet is a drug.