Posted by Randy on 1st March 2010
An article on A List Apart on public speaking tips got me thinking on some of my hard-learned presentation lessons:
- Don’t try to do live software/website/application demos — If you are interfacing with an audience you can’t also interface with software — at least I can’t. If you focus on the audience you mess up stuff in the application and vice-versa. It is never as interesting for the audience as it seemed in your mind pre-talk. Keep it simple: take screen shots and have a scripted walk-through of what you want to show.
- Don’t start in Powerpoint when creating the presentation. Outline your main points first — what you want to communicate with the talk. I use a simple text editor — no formatting, no bullted, just thoughts. Then order/organize and think through how you build your points. Then think how best to visualize those points. Finally open Powerpoint, Keynote or, even better, the open-source OpenOffice Impress.
- Avoid bullet pointed text-based lists. If your presentation is based on bullet points it will be no worse than average — which means boring. You are using a visual communication tool — don’t make people read. Use strong visuals. I like to search Flickr for creative commons licensed photos. A couple of slides with text/bullets is OK where appropriate. But make those the exception, not the rule.
- Expect the technology to fail. Get to the room early, 30 minutes ahead if in unfamiliar territory. Have your presentation on a usb thumb drive in ppt, pptx, pdf versions AND on your own laptop (remember the vga connectors if it is a MAC) AND posted on a web site in PDF form AND a printed version — you get the idea.
- Use a wireless clicker. This lets you get out from behind the laptop/podium, avoiding the distraction of the laptop keyboard (remember #1: minimize need to interface with software), and out in front, facing your audience. It is a small thing that has a big impact.
Most important remember you are there to communicate with the audience. Look at them, talk TO them (i.e. don’t read off your slides), kibbutz with them, entertain them, engage them. If you do this your message will come across. Don’t, and they’ll be asleep. Remember how it feels when you’re snoozing yourself at yet another bullet-filled, text heavy, typical presentation.
A List Apart: Articles: Training the Butterflies: Interview with Scott Berkun
I strongly recommend working on paper or a whiteboard, any non-digital media where you can work freely. Make a list of the points you want to make, or key ideas/feelings/questions you want your audience to leave with, and develop those first.
Speaker Confessions
Scott Berkun is the best selling author of The Myths of Innovation and Making Things Happen.
Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School | Brain Rules |
How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget—and so important to repeat new knowledge?
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Posted by Randy on 17th February 2010
What is the continuing role of electronic portfolios? An article in Campus Technology reviews the issues related to ownership of the content, and what happens when the student graduates. A student-centered approach seems most logical to me — effective use comes when the student feels ownership of the content and sees a practical use for its existence (like getting a job). If they find the portfolio tool useful after graduation it seems short-sighted for the school to terminate the relationship. If the institution accepts that the student ‘owns’ the content, and that the school simply provides a service — just like facebook or any other such service — then this relationship, and any risks, should be clear. You have an acceptable use policy, and if users abuse the policy their accounts get shut off. But this also means accepting some institutionally uncomfortable, or at least potentially uncomfortable, situations. Welcome to the world of user-centric content!
LaaN vs. Social Constructivism ~ Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes
According to Chatti, “learning as a Network (LaaN) differs from social constructivism in four different ways:
- In LaaN, knowledge is a personal network rather than an object that can be constructed.
Here, There, & Everywhere — Campus Technology
the current debate on the future of ePortfolios: How are they evolving with the growth of Web 2.0? What are the right tools to create them? And do they have a role beyond the academic setting as part of a person’s lifelong learning endeavors?
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Posted by Randy on 17th February 2010
I co-presented on e-portfolio use at our school yesterday, joined by Sarah Stevens-Morling from the drama school and Monica Reed from the music school. Here is the official description:
What is an e-Portfolio? As with many evolving technologies the term can mean different things to different people. For students at the schools of Drama and Music, with a need to showcase their professional work on the internet, the meaning is clear. It is a platform that allows them to quickly and easily organize, publish and share content with fellow students, faculty and professionals outside of Yale. In Fall 2009 both schools launched an e-portfolio service to their students. In this talk we will describe how the service is delivered, review current use patterns, and reveal what has worked well, and not so well, in our first year.
Presenters:
- Monica Ong Reed, Design Manager, School of Music
- Sarah Stevens-Morling, Online Communications and Print Advertising Manager, School of Drama
- Randall Rode, Information Technology Director, School of Drama
And our presentation slides — some of the transitions are a little garbled in the transition to SlideShare format, but most of it is readable.
Collaborative Learning Center » Blog Archive » TwTT E-Portfolios
TwTT E-Portfolios
February 16th, 2010
11:00 am
Bass Library, L01
Digication e-portfolio solutions
Hear from one of our users:
“Digication provided students an amazing opportunity to showcase and share their experience with the entire school community, as well as future classes. Many students immediately said, ‘I can do this’ or ‘I like this’ and were excited by the opportunity to incorporate their personality into their e-Portfolio.”
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Posted by Randy on 16th February 2010
Innovation is hard. Sure it sounds like a good idea in the abstract — but when the everyday pressures of cost, time and keeping people happy come into play, the old familiar solutions normally win out. I fall into this trap myself more often than I care to admit. For instance lately I’ve been shopping around a really cool idea — a complete game changer for one of our key web sites. We’d replace a bunch of custom web programing with Drupal, integrated with our CRM system making content updates much easier, quicker, and distributed across more staff. We found two organizations doing something similar who would even share their custom modules.
But when it comes to applying this to an actual project we consider trying this potential new approach, but keep ending up sticking with the status quo. What we need is an opportunity to experiment with technology-driven solutions to problems outside the confines of project time lines — without the demands of a normal workday — in a forum where failure is an option. In short we need an technology innovation barn-raising/quilting bee/ideas forum. Modeled after the Hack Day concept, here is how it might work as a motivator for development of new, untried ideas across the entire company:
- The convention itself would take place over two days in a meeting facility. Participants work in teams to crank out a technology-based application that creates value for the company and can be taken from idea to prototype in two days.
- 3 months before the event employees would be invited to propose ideas/problems/opportunities to be addressed. Any and all ideas from the community would be welcome. Maybe a series of idea workshops would be held — with the added goal to help publicize the idea and market participation.
- People interested in participating in the event would troll the idea forum, find something of interest, and organize a team to come up with some solution. Cross-functional, cross-departmental groups encouraged. Teams cold advertise on the forum to recruit others with specific skills or experience. The team would put together a short proposal with a rough approach and what technologies would be used. The proposals would be reviewed by the innovation convention committee.
- A proposed idea like ‘make event schedules more accessible’ might be answered by a group proposing to build a location-aware iPhone app that shows a map of all the day’s events on a map centered around the users current location.
- Selection criteria for proposals could include elements such as relevance, maturity of the idea, quality of the approach, use of existing resources, low implementation cost and the likelihood of the team completing a prototype within the time frame. Technology support might include access to server resources or sample data sets — existing resources. Participants would bring their own laptops, software, etc.
- On the day of the event teams would gather in a conference type facility. They’d be provided with technical support (server access, networking, etc.) based on their proposal requirements. Snacks, lunch and all that good type of stuff would also be provided. The days would run “officially” run from 9 – 5 but teams work as long and as late as they need.
- On the 2nd day all activity would stop by 1pm. After lunch each team would hold a presentation of their work. Everyone attending would submit an evaluation of each of the presentation, with final selection of winners made by the innovation committee.
- Prizes would be awarded for most innovative solution(s), maybe in a range of categories.
This innovation forum falls somewhere between something like New York City’s recent data apps contest, Yahoo Hack Days and Google’s 20% dedication to new ideas. The cost is low — two days with the participants released from normal work — a couple of meals — access to existing technical resources. And the potential benefits are pretty high — working prototypes of innovative solutions to common problems around the organization. Not bad from the cost/benefit ratio perspective, and a pretty good morale booster too. So what do you think? Would employees participate? Would the administration support it? Would it work?
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Posted by Randy on 15th February 2010
Nercomp recently opened registration for the upcoming WordPress University workshop on April 8 in Norwood, MA. And people are already signing up (thanks Pat!) It is going to be a great day with fabulous speakers and lots of good networking opportunities. I’m also planning some type of WordPress meet-up at Nercomp’s annual conference coming to Providence, RI March 8-10. More on that coming soon.
NERCOMP – Northeast Regional Computing Program
Date/Time:
Thursday, April 08, 2010
9:00am – 3:00pm
Location:
Four Points Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center
1125 Boston Providence Turnpike
Norwood, MA
5
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Posted by Randy on 10th February 2010
Gobal Ignite Week is coming March 1 – 5 — and it looks like there may be events here in New Haven. Could be fun — I’m following the twitter feed. Could be fun.
Speakers- Ignite New Haven
If you think you have what it takes to Ignite a crowd, here’s your chance – But remember, you only have 5 minutes! We’re not accepting proposals just yet, but we want you to start thinking about your topic – A topic that is entirely up to you.
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Posted by Randy on 10th February 2010
How is the information technology department viewed in your organization? Too expensive, too slow, always say no, better to outsource? If any of these sound familiar then it might be time to take some lessons from The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value. Overall the book is excellent — clearly presented with plenty of real examples to illustrate the various points. I found it tough to keep my attention focused on the book, not because is was boring, but because the ideas rang so true I found myself thinking through how I might employ them in my own workplace.
I’ll only touch on a couple of ideas from the book. The first section touches on value traps — commonly held ideas that are not only wrong, but hold the It organization back from real effectiveness. For instance the notion that IT’s purpose is to deliver quality technology. Technology is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a more effective organization. IT needs to deliver solutions, not just a service. Another value trap goes along the lines of “follow our rules or we can’t guarantee it will work.” Engineers like certainty, but business leaders are often happy to settle for close enough if it gets the job done. And they will find ways to end-run IT regulations that are seen as obstructing progress and see IT as a barrier rather than enabler of progress. What IT does need to do is measure and benchmark its projects in terms of business effectiveness, and communicate that information throughout the business. The big trick is to stop thinking like a service unit and become integral the process of creating new value for the organization. Improving IT is not so much about making the IT department better, but utilizing IT to make the entire organization better. As the authors conclude:
” A small but growing group of CIOs has figured out how to show value and deliver increasing value in terms that are utterly convincing to their enterprises.”
And the lessons described in the book look to be a pretty effective place to start.
The Real Business of IT: a real value to IT executives book review
The Real Business of IT is a clear and focused look at the issue of IT value and the approaches to capture, communicate and increase that value. This book is unique in several respects. It is a book written for CIOs largely based on the experience of CIOs.
The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value – Harvard Business Review
In The Real Business of IT, Richard Hunter and George Westerman reveal that the cost mind-set stems from IT leaders’ inability to communicate about the business value they create-so CIOs get stuck discussing budgets rather than their contributions to the organization.
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Posted by Randy on 8th February 2010
Confused by what Google Wave might be useful for? Here is a nicely demonstrated scenario going through a business process modeling project. I like the example of new members re-playing the Wave to catch up on the team’s progress — very efficient. It seems to me that a workplace effort to encourage this type of Google Wave use would need some type of kick-off/introduction workshop. Get a big group together, have some scripted collaborative tasks, and have them use wave to accomplish those tasks. You’d teach the tool and also work on the general topic of effective collaboration/team work.
Using Gravity to collaborate on processes
Google Wave has been around for a few months now and though the hype is fading away we are seeing more and more practical use-cases in the enterprise. One excellent example is SAP’s Business Process Modelling tool gone collaborative; Gravity. We have been fortunate to work with a prototype version of Gravity with access to the minds behind the concept. Gravity is a Business Process Modeling tool which can be accessed as a gadget in the Google Wave client. This integration in Google Wave allows for collaboration over time and / or near real time, on business processes. This model is exportable to Netweaver BPM via BPMN 2.0 XML, thus making it a fully integrable modelling tool for use in an SAP landscape. Still puzzled? check this video with an explanatory example:
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Posted by Randy on 25th January 2010
In a recent InfoWorld article Bob Lewis offers a strategy to “the promised land, where IT is a strategic partner to the rest of the business, not a subservient order taker content to process work requests while accepting the blame for everything that goes wrong.” Sound like a familiar problem? He maintains that the common practice of treating technology services as an internal business treating other departments as customers in a fee for service relationship is at the heart of the problem.
This relationship puts the information technology (IT) professionals in the role of reacting to customer requests and working selfishly to maximize the charging potential of every opportunity. Efficiencies that might reduce service requests across several customers also reduce charging potential for the IT units. IT responds to individual customer needs and priorities are set by those units most willing or able to pay. This all results to an us-vs-them mentality that rarely rewards the parties for considering wider, institutional opportunities and broader implications of technology decisions. For instance if one department contracts with the central IT programming unit to build a web-based student application, and pays dearly for it, they will be disinclined to ‘give’ it to another deparment (why shouldn’t they pay too?) — and the IT unit builds the application to so specifically meet one department’s needs that it probably can’t be used by others without a lot of rewriting anyhow. I speak from direct experience — this stuff really happens.
So what is the path to Mr. Lewis’ proposed promised land? When working with other departments IT directors “..say, ‘My job is to help you and the company succeed, ‘ followed by ‘Show me how you do things now.’ NOT ‘I know better than you’ but rather ‘let’s work together so I understand your needs and we can find a solution that works for everyone.’ The conversation starts by asking ‘how can we operate better” rather than a focus on simply delivering software and hardware infrastructure. Technology planning is aligned with the overall strategic objectives for the organization. Budgets priorities are set in the discussion over how the application of technology can help meet those objectives in an efficient, timely and cost effective way. Sounds good to me.
Run IT as a business — why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen | Adventures in IT – InfoWorld
..the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business, meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies, and ITIL… My advice? Don’t act like a separate business. Do the opposite — be the
most internal of internal departments. Become so integrated into the
enterprise that nobody would dream of working with anyone else.
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Posted by Randy on 19th January 2010
Jon Mott and David Wiley have posted their paper on Open learning. Well done, nicely argued, with good supporting references. Bravo! Their basic point is traditional Content Management Systems — i.e. Sakai, Blackboard — reinforce the the management side of teaching to the detriment to the innovative, student-centered, learning side of the equation. And while I agree with much of their argument, I’ve come to realize that this approach also misses some important points:
- First there is a crucial different between informal learning — like watching openMIT course — and actually paying for classes at MIT. The crucial difference is MIT teaches their students but also certifies that they’ve met certain educational standards. And this certification requires meeting standards defined by accreditation bodies. In order to meet these requirements defined standards must be measured. These measures happen at a per-class, per-semester basis. Ideal? No. But convenient and efficient from the accreditation measurement requirement? Yes.
- Second. OK, so course management systems are mostly used by faculty to facilitate classroom management — distributing course materials, grading, announcements, emails. But maybe the use of technology to handle these frees up the faculty member to be more creative in class. Let’s remember that innovative teaching doesn’t NEED to utilize technology — there is still room for creativity with person-to-person, faculty-to-student transmission.
- Third, many faculty are already utilizing new technologies outside of the CMS. Facebook, twitter, blogging — all have found places inside better classrooms as a faculty member finds meet their educational objectives. Why not let faculty members take advantage of whatever extra-university technologies best meet their needs. If we formalize those resources, do we risk taking out the spontaneity? And why assume just because the CMS doesn’t look innovative, that the classroom experience isn’t?
- There is also a bit of a conflict between a current student’s learning experiences, and the learning for those who come after them. For instance last spring I attended a systems thinking workshop where the class did the beer game. If before the class we’d read a former student’s experiences, and learned the tricks of the game, the experience of participating in it would have been ruined. Working in education is both fun and frustrating because we watch each new group of students make the same mistakes and discoveries over and over again. The fact that current CMS’ lock out and even delete past learning experiences might actually be a good thing. And this activity doesn’t negate the learning that has occurred, it just removed the digital record that it occurred.
Mott and Wiley make many excellent points, and the paper is well worth reading. But the reality of the complex environment that education inhabits is that there are no easy answers. Conflicting forces pull in many directions. But regular discussion and the questioning of current, accepted practices is one of the best ways to advance our profession.
Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network | in education
The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process.
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Reverend
Andre Malan
Matthew K. Gold