Jason Young at eXtension posted a link on the Extension Tech listerve to an interesting site by Garr Reynolds about presentation skills and graphics. Moving around the site I found this excellent page called Top Ten Slide Tips for power point. I found it to be very good and worthwhile for Extension professionals. We tend to use power point slides as our teaching plan organizers, putting most of items we want to cover into the slides. It makes our teaching job easier, but at the expense of our audience. Slide after slide just full of bullet points.
For a good audio podcast that has similar themes, check out one of last year’s Manager Tools podcasts: it focuses on using power point. Good stuff to listen to while out driving or working out. An overall message from both sources: put less stuff in the slides and more into a separate handout. We all too often use the slides as both the visual presentation medium and the handout.
I’m guilty of what I’m critiquing. It’s way too easy to simply open a slide and start writing stuff. Then I print the whole thing out and make copies. Time for me to work on improving that practice.
Future Salon carries word of a free Singularity conference at Stanford on May 13. I think this is further proof that a once peripheral concept has gained mainstream attention. This is longer term future stuff, but maybe not as far out as one would imagine. The concept is extremely tough for most folks to get their arms around. Basically, humans and their tools reach a stage where higher than human intelligence is created. See the definitions or descriptions here and here. I talked earlier about the Singularity concept coming mainstream here.
The key for Extension professionals grounded in more day to day realities is to recognize that concepts like this exist, and that people are taking them seriously. Even more intriguing are the developments that singularity proponents site as indications of the singularity occurring. These include advances in nanotechnology and the general exponential increase in our knowledge base. How do we handle and manage more and more sources of information? By moving to more “pull” versus “push” methods of tracking and collecting data and information. A good starting point is with a desktop aggregator. I’ll share more on this later.
Educause has a really concise two page overview of social bookmarking. A good handout to get a quick overview on the topic.