Friday, March 28, 2014

Putting Presentation Power To Work in a Pecha Kucha Package

Students will combine a number of techniques from class discussion and exercises, ranging from Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen Tips to the Assertion-Evidence Approach (and much more) to create an engaging presentation in a "liberating constraint" called Pecha Kucha!

Pecha Kucha is an intentionally innovative mode for presentations that require presenters to use only 20 slides and to speak for only 20 seconds per slide  - for a total of 400 seconds in a presentation! It forces communicators to think carefully about the visual communication taking place in each slide - and to write carefully to maximize the verbal communication in each slide.

Students will begin developing a Pecha Kucha presentation which will showcase all their knowledge in the course topics - and will present their masterpieces LIVE as part of their final project requirements. Check out the class resources here: http://limestonedigital.weebly.com/digital-literacies.html

Monday, March 17, 2014

Speak to the Eyes: Visual Presentation


Yeah, PowerPoint can be pretty bad... but there is a reason for the badness. In class we discussed how new media literacies are formed via Remediation (Bolter & Grusin.) We also considered Marshall McLuhan's observation that, in its infancy, every new medium contains the old medium/media as the content. We previewed four ways to break bad PowerPoint habits: 1) Get Better Examples, 2) Think Outside the Box (Break the template), 3) Explore the Methods of New "Best Practices," 4) Adopt Liberating Constraints.

Students will post their reflections on our discussions, and will try their hand at imitating a better example of a "good" slide show from SlideShare - and will discuss what makes their selection a "good" example.