Excited about learning and it shows!
Are you part of the problem or the solution? How badly are you contributing to Global Warming? The Carbon Neutral Company has an easy way for you to become carbon neutral and off set your contributions to the problem. Al Gore, in a couple presentations TED.com drives home the importance of getting involved NOW!
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Ken Watson has developed the graphic below. He has some great insight into maintaining a digital photography archive. A must read.
Read the full article: www.rideau-info.com/photos/storage.html
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Another great topic to consider from Passionate Users. The future is not in learning… offers the concept that the future is for those who can unlearn old ways fast. Going back to zero seems to be a very important component of adapting to a new age. When a new technology or concept begins to reinvent the way things get done, the person who can adapt quickly wins. So, it is more about being able to scaffold new understanding for some things and tear down old ideas and rebuild on new ones for others. God, give me the wisdom to know the difference.
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Below is screencast of yesterday’s tour through some of the features in del.icio.us.
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TiddlyWiki is a standalone wiki. It can reside on a flash drive, your local computer or even, daring I state, a real web server. The HTML file consists of HTML, CSS and AJAX Javascript for it’s magic. One needs to experience it to understand the power and simplicity of the concept. Truly amazing. It can be a blog, a wiki, a Getting Things Done “trusted system” and so much more. Ya know, I think I even saw a kitchen sink in there!
Read more at www.tiddlywiki.com
View this presentation highlighting the features:
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Bold - UBD
Italic - A.T.O.M.
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Many people ask what is a post or page slug? At Wordpress.org you will find a great definition.
A slug is a few words that describe a post or a page. Slugs are usually a URL friendly version of the post title (which has been automatically generated by WordPress), but a slug can be anything you like. Slugs are meant to be used with permalinks as they help describe what the content at the URL is.
Example post permalink: http://wordpress.org/development/2006/06/wordpress-203/The slug for that post is “
wordpress-203“.
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We have all been stuck in slide show presentations that could not have been more stale or boring. I mean, it seemed at times that they were engineered to confound the mind. Well, research seems to confirm what we felt; slide shows can interfere with learning.
Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.
Taken from WIRED; PowerPoint Is Evil. Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely. By Edward Tufte
Let’s look at our audience. A good presenter should know their audience. Last time I noticed, I was presenting to humans. John Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory details the limitations of the human mind to hold discrete pieces of information in short-term memory. Explore more of John Sweller’s take on PowerPoint and it’s limitations in the PresentationZen.com post, Is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint? It is a must read.
Supposedly, phone numbers are only 7 digits long because the mind can only hold seven pieces of information in short term memory, plus or minus two numbers depending on other variables according to George A. Miller . There are strategies like “Chunking“, an idea that we can more efficiently use short-term memory, but in general we are limited by what we can absorb in a short period of time. Something to consider when presenting to homo sapiens.
I know when I started working with PowerPoint I was excited to build beautiful templates and have all kinds of cool effects happen during slide transitions. Getting the ornate 3D charts and graphs to represent my data seemed like the thing to do. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out this wizardry just to find out that it actually distracts from my presentation’s message. The templates are worse for your presentation than starting with a simple plain layout.
Forgive me, I have sinned. I used to “talk to my slides” during presentation. Reading them word for word is the ultimate way to kill your audience’s interest in your topic. How we interact with the information on the screen can either add or detract from the colors, fonts and images in the slides. Kathy Sierra details great advice and cites resources to improve presentations in her blog entry; Stop your presentation before it kills again! Something else to consider, we are emotional creatures. Use this in your presentation. Seth Godin comments in his post, Really Bad PowerPoint supports this; no emotion, no connection.
Some of the best presenters are Lawrence Lessig, Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, and Dick Hardt. Examine their approaches.
Lawrence Lessig Presentation on Free Culture
Dick Hardt inspired by Lessig presented the OSCON 2005 Keynote - Identity 2.0.
Seth Godin Presentation Example
Guy Kawasaki 10 - 20 -30 Rule Presentation
Microsoft PowerPoint
Apple Keynote
Open Office Impress
Convert your slide show into MindManager presentation, a completely different way to see the information based on mind mapping. Craig Pringle explains good rationale for this in his post; Ditch PowerPoint for Presentations.
Read the blog entry Marketing should be education, education should be marketing at Passionate Users. This puts teaching and the job teachers need to pull off in a better context.
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Today we created del.icio.us accounts to organize our online resources.
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