Evidence Based Presentation
April 10, 2008
I don’t agree with everything Dr. Abela says but he does have some strong points. He’s repeating some of the concepts we’ve talked about before-
- Purify your slides
- No useless transitions or animations
- Use lots of graphics and little text
He also advises using only black and white unless you’re using color to emphasize a point in the slide. Dr. Abela feels that lessens the cognitive load on the view who will be trying to apply a rationale to your color choice (even if there is no rationale). I’m not sure I’ll go that far as I feel that color plays a role in the audience’s engagement and the proper use of color tends to make your presentation appear more professional.
If you’d like to see more posts about presentation check out the UR Presentation blog.
Learning Spaces
April 7, 2008
Check out the Learning Spaces Contest! This is your chance to have a say in the future of classrooms and learning spaces at the University of Richmond and win great prizes.
NMC Presentation on Mashups
April 2, 2008
I’m doing a presentation tomorrow with Jim Groom on how to create mashups without knowing anything about programming. The fun thing is it’s presented using a mashup of communist propaganda posters and that sort of rhetoric. Good clean American fun! It may, or may not, be presented entirely in a fake Russian accent. It will entirely depend on my mood (and Jim’s).
My example takes a table of information from Wikipedia on Industrial Warfare and steps you through the ways you can change it using SIMILE’s Exhibit. If you bother to look at the actual Exhibit pages you’ll see they link back to the Google
So, you’ll start with this-
Step 1
Making this data interactive- so I cut and paste the table into Excel and clean up the data a little bit. I make the html portion of Exhibit. Then I get what’s below- an interesting level of interactivity has been added. You can select/omit/sort the data now. So seeing relationships is a lot easier.
Step 2
Adding the visual component- now I felt that we needed something more visual so I added some image URLs and URLs to the Wikipedia articles. Now we’ve got the same level of interaction but with added visual content and the ability to follow information outward.
Step 3
Adding the map- if I were fancier I’d saying “adding the geo-spatial element.” I kept the visual interface underneath the map for this one but it probably could be removed.
Step 4
This is the final step and it’s adding the data and presentation of the timeline element.
So, the whole point in this is that Exhibit is freeing the information so that you can tweak and bend and add to the information until it does exactly what you need. You don’t have to accept information the way it is. You can change it and ultimately make it far more valuable to you and your students.
