EduGlu Sandbox

As I follow links and burrow around presentations on places like Slideshare its invigorating that a lot of people are embracing a more visual presentations style, where in fact a lot of the sones you see are all images, nary a bullet point to be seen.

There is, however, a pitfall. On its own, these “shared” presentations are rather useless pieces of information, because they are just a bunch if picture flip cards. Seveal times last week, I looked at a few that came my way via twitter or RSS, and if this was all I had to go in terms of information, I have no idea what the message is, what is being presented. I can infer, maybe guess, but….

The presentation file is not the presentation w/o something more contextual.

So if you are sharing your presentations, my thoughts are:

• Provide, links to notes, resources on a blogpost, wiki, etc; OR
• If you are using the infermal PowerPoint, put nores, references, links in the slide notes- those automatically get imported to Slidehare (and how I wish and wish, and ask, and beg that when Slideshare published, they use some simple regex to make the URLs into links. It so damned easy to code); OR
• Record your audio and sync it to make it a SlideCast; OR
• Have someonbe video you speaking, and sync it with a tool such as Zentation or Vascmo which allow you to sync video to slides; OR
• Go reall crazy and Ustream it and save it as an archive.

Yes it;s more work (not that much if you are PowerPointing, and notes may help you be more organized), but the value of your presentation goes up an order of magnitude (from near zero at least) by having some context for the pretty pictures.

I also am having this nagging gripe (well it is one among many) about Second Life. After being in world for 2+ years, and attending a lot of education events, I find myself floored by the irony that the way we share information in a 3d immersive world is rendering 2d images (slides) and lecturing to a passive audience sitting in nice neat rows. Isn’t this silly? or worse?

its time in 3D worlds to taek full advantage of a 3d presentation space, and to do more than be a monologue. If you want some exampels, check out these archives (recorded in Adobe Connect, so its not as smooth as the original experience) from the NMC Symposium on Mashups:

• Brian Lamb’s over the top mashup “performance”, Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist which had most of the people out of their seats.
• Mash Up Your Creative Tools: Art in Second Life™ by SL artist Don Whitacker where we rendered/presented 3D objects

Kill the damn slideshows. I wont even trot out the 2.0 expression.