ALES 204: Lecture 14

Strong Presentations and Slideshare

Outline

• What NOT to do• Presentation Zen – Garr Reynolds• Death by PowerPoint – Alexei Kapterev• Slideshare• Practise• Homework

What Not to Do

Presentation Zen – Garr Reynolds

• Context Matters• Simple but not Simplistic• Visual Makeover

BEFORE. The problem with the slide on the left is that the clip-art used does not reinforce the statistic, nor does it even fit the theme of women in the Japanese labor market. The background is a tired, overused PowerPoint template. The text is difficult to read. And as one trainee commented: "it's ugly."

The slide on the right was an effort to display the same information in a pie chart. Besides using an overused template, the visual displays the pie chart in a distorted and inelegant fashion. For the sake of clarity, it is usually best to avoid 3-D effects. Also, rather than giving the slide a title, a declarative sentence that states the point directly may be more appropriate.

Before

All the slides were redesigned to match the theme above. The slide on the left was the one used for the presentations. But the one on the right could also be used effectively. Notice that either slide (especially the slide without any text) would be virtually meaningless without the presenter's narration. The handout that followed the presentation expanded on the relevance of the statistic and gave it context. The five-page handout proved to be a good reference for those who attended the presentation and for those who did not.

After

Class Activity• As we go through the following presentation

• Tweet three things you did not know before about powerful presentations

• @JessL• #ALES204

http://www.slideshare.net/thecroaker/death-by-powerpoint

Slideshare

• Slideshare is a site where you can host your presentations and share them with others.

• Presentations can be linked to at the site itself or else embedded in a web page.

• You can also synchronise an MP3 audio file (podcast) with the slideset to create a slidecast – a more powerful way of distributing presentations/tutorials.

• Slideshare is also a tremendous resource site of presentations.

Free!

Practise

• Look at the paper you brought in today• What is the significance (intro slide)• What is the structure (body slides)• Final conclusions/next steps (end slides)

• Think about visuals with impact (Flickr creative commons or your own)

Homework• No Class on Monday – Thanksgiving!

• Read: Jessica Laccetti, Folksonomy and Thomas Vander Wal: http://www.jesslaccetti.co.uk/2007/09/folksonomy-and-thomas-vander-wal.html

• Thomas Vander Wal, Folksonomy: A Hated Word but a Loved Resource: http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/assets/VanderWalDMU07. pdf

• Clay Shirky, Ontology is Overrated: http://www.shirky.com/writings/

ontology_overrated.html

• Wikipedia entries on folksonomy, metadata, taxonomy, and social network.

• Presentation: Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas, Tags, Networks and Narrative: http://www.slideshare.net/deleriad/tags-networks- narrative