Slideology Zen

OK, I am posting my first blog for H800 issues and it's not what we're required to write about (because I haven't got there yet - I'm only 3 weeks behind). However, I've been reading a lot on an 'older' technology which is slide presentation. Three books in particular have grabbed me as they all seem to be saying more or less the same thing. That is that most of us tend to use our slides as an alternative form of teleprompting. That is the slides with their bullet points tend to act as a prompt for the speaker (lecturer) to guide their talk. The result 'death by Powerpoint'.

I stand guilty as charged of this for many many many occasions.

The problem of course is that this means that the speaker becomes the supporting component to the slides and not the other way around - aka 'death by Powerpoint'.

Now it turns out that there's great ways to use slides and if you want to see fantastic examples of that watch any Apple Keynote presentation by Steve Jobs (regardless of whether you love or hate Apple and their products), or the fabulous Al Gore in an Inconvenient Truth.

So the resources that I am talking about:

Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds

Slide:ology, by Nancy Duarte

Presenting to Win, by Jerry Weissman.

The first two are very heavy on the design considerations of designing slides. Weissman's book leans much more towards the relevancy of the content.

One thing that I find interesting is the very strong preparation work that goes into making these presentations. This i think is very relevant to the section of our course that is looking at the design elements of learning material construction. In particular these experts make a big deal of being 'efficient' in the use of slides, questioning what their relevancy is to the message. Translation, we should design to teach only what is necessary - as time (like the attention span of a Powerpoint audience) is a limited resource. Having read the books I'm looking at some of the slide shows that we've been asked to consider and I feel that they could probably learn a thing or two from these books in terms of design.

Either way I 'know' that there's important lessons from these books that translate into educational design - even if at the moment I cannot quite elucidate where the overlaps are.

Of course there's nothing like seeing the real thing. Log onto the slideshare site and go to this link. Garr has done a presentation on a brilliant book (also highly, highly recommended, especially as an alternative way to repurpose existing 'print' technology). Amongst the many many excellent slides, check out slide 150 - absolute perfection of a slide.

E. rubecula's Blog Stuff

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