Scott Rosenberg: The single deadliest thing a speaker can do is read from his own slides. Agreed. It always exasperates me to see slides used as speakers notes rather than as helpful visual aids.
Want to know how to give a good presentation with slides? Here’s what I learned from two masters. It’s more than a half-decade old, but its tips are no less useful.
I’ve used this before as part of teaching presentation skills to consultants. Blogging it now so I can find it again later.
Arthur C. Clarke on Information Pollution. Castolari writes “Here is an interesting interview of Arthur C. Clarke and his views on regulating communications, as well as what he sees as the past, … [Slashdot]
Insight and perspective from one of my favorite authors. Here’s my favorite comment:
We are now faced with the responsibility of discernment. Just as our ancestors quickly realised that no one was going to force them to read the entire library of a thousand books, we are now overcoming the initial alarm at the sheer weight of available information and coming to understand that it is not the information itself that determines our future, only the use we can make of it.
It comes down to exercising judgment. Clarke has it and thinking about what he has to say is worth the time.
Time.
It’s about time
Time is all we have. Most of us can feel time speeding up. Many of us are enslaved by time. But most of what we consider “time” is actually in our heads.
“What part of now is it you don’t understand?” –Zydeco… [Internet Time Blog]
A link-rich meditation from Jay Cross. Just skimming what Jay has provided and linked to could easily take days.
Stolen but unfinished. Prodded by Maish’s eLearningpost, this evening I re-read John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s wonderful article, Stolen Knowledge. More than ten years old now, yet people are still absorbing the message. I gained new insights from my return visit.
… the best way to support learning is from the demand side rather than the supply side. That is, rather than deciding ahead of time what a learner needs to know and making this explicitly available to the exclusion of everything else, designers and instructors need to make available as much as possible of the whole rich web of practice-explicit and implicit-allowing the learner to call upon aspects of practice, latent in the periphery, as they are needed….
And, prodded by Jay, I just did the same.
The quote that opens the paper is also worth highlighting:
A very great musician came and stayed in [our] house. He made one big mistake . . . [he] determined to teach me music, and consequently no learning took place. Nevertheless, I did casually pick up from him a certain amount of stolen knowledge.
[Rabindrath Tagore quoted in Bandyopadhyay, 1989: 45]
Why is it such a hard step to give up on the notion of control? Or, put another way, why do organizations and schools insist on forcing certain content down people’s throats? You might want to take a look at Roger Schank’s thoughts about learning in this context. Take a look at Coloring Outside the Lines : Raising a Smarter Kid by Breaking All the Rules or at Designing World-Class E-Learning.
Or if you want things in a real nutshell consider the following bit of wisdom from Calvin and Hobbes:
2nd Email. I get a lot of email. I post it very infrequently. This is a keeper.
As I’ve Matured…
I’ve learned that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.
I’ve learned that one good turn gets most of the blankets.
I’ve learned that no matter how much I care, some people are just jack
asses.I’ve learned that whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
I’ve learned that you shouldn’t compare yourself to others – they are more
screwed up than you think.I’ve learned that depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
I’ve learned that it is not what you wear, it is how you take it off.
I’ve learned that you can keep vomiting long after you think you’re
finished.I’ve learned to not sweat the petty things, and not pet the sweaty things.
I’ve learned that ex’s are like fungus, and keep coming back.
I’ve learned age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
I’ve learned that I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy it.
I’ve learned that we are responsible for what we do, unless we are
celebrities.I’ve learned that artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
I’ve learned that 99% of the time when something isn’t working in your
house, one of your kids did it.I’ve learned that there is a fine line between genius and insanity.
I’ve learned that the people you care most about in life are taken from you
too soon and all the less important ones just never go away. And the real pains in the ass are permanent.Pass this along to 5 friends…trust me, they’ll appreciate it. Who knows,
maybe something good will happen.If not…tough.
As Always … Keep grinning …. it makes people wonder what you are up to
Since I talk about learning from time to time this seemed worth keeping and passing along.
Whither eLearning?. The MASIE Center has just released: Making Sense of Learning Specifications & Standards: A Decision Maker’s Guide to their Adoption (2nd edition) (pdf file)Eighty-two pages of cogent explanations, history, processes, and reference sources. This is one of those reference works, like a good dictionary, that you… [Internet Time Blog]
Worth having on hand
Electronic Portfolio White Paper. Everybody is talking about e-portfolios these days, and this paper talks about them a lot, 68 PDF pages worth. With contributors from Blackboard, eCollege, EDUCAUSE and a bunch of universities, among others, this paper also carries some clout. The paper aims to provide “a comprehensive review of electronic portfolios, from a conceptual understanding of applications to identifying technical and interoperability requirements (and) to provide a conceptual overview exploring potential opportunities and challenges to electronic portfolio adopters and developers.” This it does, with a series of use cases and a good conceptual overview. Several architectures are proposed, but in the end, only the ‘peer-to-peer’ model is worth considering, since the others are tied to enterprise systems. Comprehensive references and resources. If you are interested in ePortfolios, I can’t think of a better place to start than with this discussion. By Gary Greenberg, ed., ePort Consortium, November 3, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
The notion of portfolios is relevant and applicable well beyond the campus. I routinely ask to see samples of people’s work when interviewing. We all produce portfolios of our work. The question is how well organized is your portfolio.
Questions matter. “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.” Naguib Mahfouz (Nobel Prize Winner) It seems far harder to ask a really good question than to supply… [Knowledge-at-work]
More on the importance of questions from Denham.
Questions and Ignorance. Questions and Ignorance — From the archives of John Lienhard’s Engines of Our Ingenuity radio show…
“I’m pretty sure that the only real function of a teacher is to guide students in asking and pursuing questions. Once a student develops the rare talent for seeking his or her own ignorance, teachers become irrelevant. But it’s hard to look at your own ignorance. And it’s not easy to ask a true question. It feels like humiliation.”
But a little humiliation is worth it to find the bliss within your ignorance. Since “Knowledge…flows to the point of greatest ignorance.”, it’s the real questions that break the dams impeding that flow. As a result, it behooves teams and organizations to both solicit and embrace them. [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]
I also think that good teachers are those who give you permission and safety to not know. Here’s a tidbit I heard on Car Talk this morning that’s relevant.
I fully realize that I have not succeeded in answering all of your questions. . .Indeed, I feel I have not answered any of them completely. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions, which only lead to more problems, some of which we weren t even aware were problems. To sum it all up . . . In some ways I feel we are confused as ever, but I believe we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things.
A Controversial View of Meta-Learning. Imagine you are the Chief Learning Officer of a successful high-tech firm in SIlicon Valley. You hear about a new eLearning title, “Mavis Beacon Teaches Reading.” It takes four hours to complete. It’s self-instructional. It’s delivered via the web. A learner can take it in… [Internet Time Blog]
Nice rant from Jay Cross I just got a chance to follow up on (one of the reasons I’m biased toward RSS feeds that provide the whole post instead of a teaser, but that’s a rant for another time). Jay’s summary:
School classes and corporate training would be more effective were learners initially told “This is our best thinking. It might be wrong. How do you see it?” That’s a meta-learning tactic that would improve results without adding costs. You could preface all eLearning with a reminder that learners should look for ways to improve the content, drop thoughts in the electronic suggestion box, and that they organization is always on the lookout for ways to improve its service. Positioning a learning event as inquiry instead a recounting of someone else’s truth puts a touch of humanity back into eLearning that’s often sterile.
Getting the concept of meta-learning to take hold requires acceptance that nothing is set in stone. There are no givens. The world is uncertain. Everything is relative. People can learn to learn better by taking a long term view in which learning answers the inevitable query of “What’s in it for me?”
The only thing controversial here is that this attitude is so hard to find in practice.
