Here’s a quick test Post from TweetDeck

Here’s a quick test Post from TweetDeck to my wordpress.com blog. Does this work? If so, not sure this is useful, but interesting.

Back to Blogging? Thoughts about presentations…

I’m back!

Maybe.

After nearly two years of letting this blog languish (Twitter is so much easier!), I’m posting something again.

I just finished presenting with Bryan Alexander, NITLE’s Director of Research; Trina Marmarelli, Instructional Technologist, Reed College; and Bill Junkin, Director of Instructional Technology, Eckerd College about alternatives to the standard PowerPoint presentation. Bryan gave a nice introduction to how people are starting to break away from bulleted slides. Trina talked about a new form that people are imposing on PowerPoint called Pecha-kucha. Bill gave a demonstration of Ubiquitous Presenter — a tool that allows a professor to annotate Powerpoint slides on a tablet PC while students “tag” the them. And I presented on a web-based presentation tool called Prezi, for which I created this screen cast. (The picture with this post is me using Prezi for the first time at the NITLE Instructional Technology Leader’s Conference.)

I think we just scratched the surface of this topic in the hour that we had, but it was a great start. The way that people are doing presentations is changing … or has changed … and  in a good way! New forms like Pecha-kucha and the Lessig Method,  and new technologies like Prezi and Ubiquitous Presenter, which themselves encourage different approaches to presentations, are shaking us out of the deadly bulleted slide and encouraging us to communicate more clearly with our audiences.

When we are thinking about Information/Technology Literacy/Fluency for our students, this should be part of the conversation. We are well past the time when undergraduate students have to learn the mechanics of Powerpoint. Most of our students have been using Powerpoint since Middle School, sometimes even Elementary. What they still need to learn (and what we should be teaching them) is how to use this and similar tools to communicate effectively. And the stuff we covered today, it seems to me, could play a big part in that.