Thing 12: Presenting and sharing

The post for Thing 12 offers some helpful thoughts on presentation, independently of any electronic aids: think what exactly you're seeking to put across, who you're hoping to put it across to, what's the best structure for your message.  Indeed.  Those things are far more important than electronic aids, and may even lead you to decide that a given presentation should be done without electronic aids.  I follow public-speaking guru Max Atkinson on Twitter having first come across him, back in 2009, strongly disrecommending PowerPoint for facilitating presentation without skill.

I note that Max Atkinson's blog hasn't covered PowerPoint since 2011.  Has his influence led to public speakers being more skillful and restrained in their use of this tool?  It's only just occurred to me to ask on Twitter if people have noticed any such trend, and I have not set the Twitterverse ablaze thereby.

My subjective impression is that people are not using PowerPoint any less.  For the skill, I suppose I had better offer comparisons with my response to other media.  I can't recall a PowerPoint that frustrated me as much as an overhead projector presentation I remember from the 1980s (the presenter wrote her ideas on to the slides while speaking, and took each slide off before I had finished copying it into my notes).  But neither has a PowerPoint made me stand in the street and applaud (as a Carling Black Label ad once did, for its technique not its message) or moved me to tears (as an anti-drink-drive TV commercial once did, for everything).

My own offering is about washing up.  On my computer it has 5 slides, and on SlideShare, for some reason, slide 5 appears twice.  I'd better admit that I used Open Office Impress rather than PowerPoint, and perhaps there is some glitch between the open-source file and the other programs the upload led it through.

Thing 11: Slideshare

I'll structure this post around the questions Kirsty gives us in her instructions.

* What are your thoughts about the tool?

Useful for sharing slideshows, if they are something you want to share. See Max Atkinson and others for reasons why slideshows need caution. The library presentations that Kirsty refers us to are good, and I wondered if there was any factor in Slideshare that worked to filter out the bad. No such factor, notoriously, is at work for the web as a whole. I set about looking for bad presentations that had made it to Slideshare. I did so in two separate searches, one for the phrase "chattering class" and one for the phrase "political correctness". I found some incompetent presentations thereby, and did not pursue that part of the experiment any further.

* What particular benefits to your Library would there be from using Slideshare?

For outreach, we might adapt some of our Alumni Weekend presentations, especially those that have involved the display of a sequence of books or pictures. Once or twice, indeed, we have used PowerPoint for that purpose, and I can think of one where the PowerPoint might, with some alterations, be worth putting online.

* Did you find any interesting presentations that you would like to share?

Not found on this search, but check out one by Tony Hirst and its pendant. The presentation is one I saw Tony give at the event "A cut above the rest: justifying information services in a tough economic climate" which CILIP's Information Services Group put on at Swaffham in April. It lists the skills that librarians are coming to need, with links to blog pages; the pendant is a blog post by Richard Nurse at the Open University, who was at a later event that Tony led after reflection and feedback on the Swaffham presentation.

I have taken refuge in 23things for now; perhaps, at the end of it, I shall be closer to acquiring those other skills. I can see that the need to do so is unlikely to go away.

* Will you use Slideshare in the future?

I might do, especially for the purpose I described, of taking the Haddon's Alumni Weekend presentations to a wider audience. In terms of practicability, Slideshare has a thick edge over the fantasy I once entertained of recycling Alumni Weekend shows at the Edinburgh Fringe.