davidwarlick

What makes a Great Online Presentation?

Posted by Dean Shareski on in Conferences, design, presentations, techlearning 7 Comments

With K12 online conference 2009 under way, it leads me to ask what makes a good online presentation? How do  you create compelling online content that can and will be reused. Remember these are not live sessions but rather presentations in a variety of formats intended to be used in a variety of ways by a variety of users. That's challenging to say the least. I applaud anyone who tackles such a task.

Since its inception in 2006, it's been interesting to see the presentations evolve. The decision last year to go to a more "TED-like" format was a good one in my opinion as it  addresses the amount of content in the conference but also gets presenters to get to the point. Twenty minutes is long enough in any context but on the web it's particularly daunting to keep folks interested.

There have been a number of delivery models and to be sure, and a clear winning style has not been established. However, there are a few concepts that seem to work, at least for me.

While it's hard to separate content from design, here are a few presentations that use some techniques that I think make … Read the rest

Understanding Free

Posted by Dean Shareski on in Blogs, free stuff 11 Comments


cc licensed flickr photo shared by Will Lion

 

I’ve been listening to Chris Anderson‘s book "The Radical Price of Free" for free. It’s a long listen, over 6 hours and I’ve still got 2 more hours to go but it’s certainly helped clarify not only how free works, but how much money is to be made by free. Sound weird? Read/listen to the book.

My financial or economic knowledge is limited at best but as a consumer and producer I recognize a few things. While I make no money from this blog directly, I’ve been fortunate to indirectly gain financially and I owe much to the work and ideas that I share here and other places. Given that was never the intent of this blog, it’s simply a nice bonus. I recognize others try and utilize their blogs for financial gain either by ads or direct pay from outside interests. But for the most part this type of free seeks no compensation, it’s just free.

As any user of the web knows, there are oodles and oodles of sites and applications that appear free. Everything from google to yahoo, we roam around these internets and create, … Read the rest

IT Summit Summary

Posted by Dean Shareski on in Conferences, EdTechs, networks, professional learning, socialnetworks 6 Comments

I’m just back from the IT Summit conference. In general, it was an outstanding conference in many respects.

People

Without trying to list the names of everyone, it’s apparent for most users of social media that face to face gathering times have changed in the past few years. I used to go to conferences and mingle with local colleagues and a few others I’d met a various functions and committees but there wasn’t much of a community. Now we meet people we’ve never seen and can enter in to meaningful discussion since all the banter and small talk takes place  in other spaces.

This conference brings together not only educators and administrators but also IT. I certainly commend our own IT team for focusing on students but not all do. This is a great way to have them understand that their clients are students and it’s a highly complex task to provide safe, secure environments that also enable them to have the access needed to use the tools that help them learn.

Keynotes

I’ve heard David Warlick live a couple of times but I must say this was worth seeing. David is a gifted storyteller but certainly connects to … Read the rest

19:53 minutes worth of goodness

Posted by Dean Shareski on in Conferences, design 5 Comments

Alec Couros‘ presentation Open, Social, Connected really delivers on how to present for an online conference. The challenge of creating content for an online conference is a daunting and exciting adventure. While this year’s presentations were limited to 20 minutes or less, they weren’t and aren’t restricted to any specific format. We’ve yet to develop too many standards in what makes a good online presentation. I’m not ready yet to thrown down the rubric. There’s too much to be explored.

Where Alec wins is in his wise mix of media including public domain video and audio, thoughtful graphics and animation, green screen, humor and a personal touch. I’ve always enjoyed presentations that show me context. Who are you? Where do you live? David Warlick did a great job with this in prior keynotes and Clarence Fisher focused largely on place in his keynote last year. Alec begins his presentation by providing a context and allowing us to get comfortable with his content.

Since his content is about open content, Alec uses video from public domain to create transitions to his piece. In this way, it’s easy for us to follow.

His feature on twitter might challenge Common Craft as … Read the rest