Everyone knows I think computers are evil and that they wait for the perfect moment to turn on us. That moment is often when one wishes to give a presentation.
Some thoughts about being prepared for presentations, and some newer ideas in presentation:
1. Turn on and log into your laptop before you need to start presenting! All you should have to do is wake your computer from sleep.
2. If you are hooking your laptop up to a foreign projector, try to make sure it works before you have to present. Just a few minutes before the "show" can save a lot of heartache when you present. At the very least, you'll know when you stand up that you don't have the visuals you planned on and can adjust your talk accordingly.
3. When at all possible, use the computer that's already there rather than hooking up yours. I usually have a Mac and the moment when I need to hook up my Mac to a regular VGA connector is the moment that the special Mac adapter goes missing - and the adapter is sufficiently different for different models and years that I can't guarantee someone else in the audience will have one. When I travel, I try to use a computer that's already there and set up for other presenters.
4. Suspenders, belt, and another belt. I put a backup copy of my EDUCAUSE presentation on a USB drive as well as uploaded one to a totally different Google account from the one in which it was living (my presenters and I collaborated on the presentation in GoogleDocs). Come hell or high water, I want to have at least one copy of the slides to show. Of course at that point version control is your issue. If you make changes up to the last minute, you won't have backup copies if you need them. Finishing BEFORE the last minute is therefore recommended.
Personally I hate PowerPoint and I hate bullet-text slides. Lots of people who've heard me say this over the years probably know I just gave a talk at EDUCAUSE with bullet-text slides (at least we built it in GoogleDocs). I feel like for a one-time talk, certainly for a conference, slides are forgivable because you do have talking points you don't want to forget, and usually data (even who you are and what school you're from) that you don't want to have to repeat or even say out loud but which are worth showing on the screen.
In the classroom, however, I strongly feel that bullet-text slides should be used sparingly, if at all. Graphs and images, by all means. But bulleted text is almost an instruction to the students to read, not listen to you; and if you darken the room at all, some tuning out, if not outright snoozing, is bound to follow.
I saw two innovations in presentation technology at EDUCAUSE that I thought were used to good effect:
First, several presenters used Prezi, the new tool that lets you build a presentation from a larger mind-map type of collection of text and images. I don't know why this is so much less boring than bullet-text slides, but it is. No matter how you focus, you know there's more image, more information or ideas, outside the frame of the screen at any one time, and somehow that's exciting. Plus just the movement indicates more of a physical relationship between the ideas than the linear march of slides. I really enjoyed the Prezi presentations that I saw and I intend to try this tool myself.
Another idea was a format, not a tool. Shelly Rodrigo's "You Are 3.0" panel used Ignite presentations to good effect. I think they were actually going more for a Pecha Kucha effect. Speakers spoke for just a couple of minutes each, with automatically advancing slides moving (sometimes with them, sometimes pushing them along, I will admit). This was almost a performance art style of presentation. The images and info on the screen amplified or illustrated what the presenters said, and added depth and interest to the presentations rather than flattening them out. The speed, while a challenge to follow (and probably a challenge to deliver), also contributed to the sense of receiving a rich but high-level idea - concepts or words stood out, not a flow of connected sentences that built together to form a cohesive linear whole.
I'm a big fan of sentences building on one another to form a cohesive whole, but in the same way that a picture of Ahab will not give me the entire substance of Moby Dick, a presentation seldom conveys everything interesting or valuable about what a presenter knows. I find I still want to read their papers or books, however, after an idea grasps me from a Prezi or Ignite presentation - and that doesn't always happen with bullet-text slides.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Peer feedback using clickers
Some of the Boot Camp participants have already heard me describe how I used clickers this past spring for peer feedback on presentations in my global media class. It was based on an idea I got from Ling Huang, a colleague from the chemistry department and also a Boot Camp graduate. He had students use clickers to effectively "grade" each other on presentations they gave on laboratory methods. I had students "grade" each other (using a 5-point Likert scale) on how well the student's presentation had tackled the fundamental questions of the class.
Apparently this idea is going around, because the ProfHacker column in the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story this week from Derek Bruff, a math professor teaching a writing course for the first time, who used clickers to have his students give each other anonymous feedback on their essays in class.
I think everyone who's using it finds similar benefits: the feedback is anonymized but immediate, and it's quantified, which gives a reassuringly impersonal feel to the feedback even as the instructor can direct the discussion towards improvement right then and there. If more than half rate the thesis statement of an essay as unclear, for instance, the discussion can turn towards making it more clear without getting bogged down in whether or not any one individual thinks it is clear.
As a faculty member who's planning to try this told me, too, an instructor can gauge whether or not he's been clear on the topic at hand by whether or not the student responses are the same as his. If the entire class rates a thesis sentence clear, and it is NOT clear, then the instructor knows there's more work to be done there.
To facilitate trying out clickers in class, Faculty Computing Services is offering a "Happy Meal" try-it program with few choices and all the service provided by us. We will bring the receiver and clickers to your classroom, gather the data, and either show it on the screen for all to see or give you one of our new handheld receivers that lets you see the results in your hand. Separately from the try-it program, we are also arranging for students to be able to rent clickers from us, to make the cost of using clickers regularly in class the same as the cost of using the clicker-enabled smartphone or laptop software, if you decide to use clickers regularly.
As always, you can ask FCS more at the Faculty Support Center, in phone, by email, or in person. The use of the clickers themselves is simple; the exercises one can do with the clickers, however, have a lot of variation. And I think the variation where students give each other immediate feedback is one of the most exciting.
Apparently this idea is going around, because the ProfHacker column in the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story this week from Derek Bruff, a math professor teaching a writing course for the first time, who used clickers to have his students give each other anonymous feedback on their essays in class.
I think everyone who's using it finds similar benefits: the feedback is anonymized but immediate, and it's quantified, which gives a reassuringly impersonal feel to the feedback even as the instructor can direct the discussion towards improvement right then and there. If more than half rate the thesis statement of an essay as unclear, for instance, the discussion can turn towards making it more clear without getting bogged down in whether or not any one individual thinks it is clear.
As a faculty member who's planning to try this told me, too, an instructor can gauge whether or not he's been clear on the topic at hand by whether or not the student responses are the same as his. If the entire class rates a thesis sentence clear, and it is NOT clear, then the instructor knows there's more work to be done there.
To facilitate trying out clickers in class, Faculty Computing Services is offering a "Happy Meal" try-it program with few choices and all the service provided by us. We will bring the receiver and clickers to your classroom, gather the data, and either show it on the screen for all to see or give you one of our new handheld receivers that lets you see the results in your hand. Separately from the try-it program, we are also arranging for students to be able to rent clickers from us, to make the cost of using clickers regularly in class the same as the cost of using the clicker-enabled smartphone or laptop software, if you decide to use clickers regularly.
As always, you can ask FCS more at the Faculty Support Center, in phone, by email, or in person. The use of the clickers themselves is simple; the exercises one can do with the clickers, however, have a lot of variation. And I think the variation where students give each other immediate feedback is one of the most exciting.
Monday, October 18, 2010
A very slow worry
I often think of the beginning of "A Midwinter's Tale" when Michael Maloney talks about his nervous breakdown as a long slow buildup. Some nervous breakdowns come quickly, catastrophically, he says; others have more of a slow build. He, he says, is 33 years old and this nervous breakdown had started when he was 7 months old and was just starting to really get a grip.
I've been worried about higher education's relationship to communication technologies since, oh, about 1994. Clearly not every class needs a technology component; clearly technology should only be used to serve the class' learning goals. But how much is too much, and how much is not enough? Not every faculty member needs to be able to communicate using 21st century methods. But how many should? Not every student needs guidance in being a digital citizen. But how many is the right number?
The Chronicle and other reports on higher education are filled with fear and numbers. How many credit hours will be required for students to get financial aid? How much profit is for-profit education making? At what age should professors retire? How much does it cost a student to earn a degree versus how much will they earn in the career they get after they earn it?
Few ask the overarching questions. Politicians don't like such questions because they don't lead to good soundbites and faculty don't always like them either. I hear way too many people on campuses responding to these questions with the answers "everyone knows" - unexamined. They're uncomfortable questions when they seem like challenges to the status quo. What is the purpose of higher education? If it is to educate workers and not citizens, what should our curricula look like? Likewise if it is to educate citizens and not workers? What should a college-educated person know or be able to do? What are our responsibilities as faculty to change higher education in general?
And then the technology-related subquestions: what should a college graduate know about networking or digital security? What should they know about digital privacy? What will the educated citizen or worker do with the technological resources available to him or her through the rest of his life? How should college be preparing our students to do those activities?
Then here's the real kicker: How long can we ignore these questions?
Most leading colleges and universities are struggling with the same questions and activities that we are. We have many digital resources - but not an infinite amount. To what should we be allocating our resources? This always leads me back to the same questions I ask myself: How many classes using technology is the right number? How many faculty should be tweeting, how many should be wiki-ing, how many should teach students what code looks like, how many should expect students to demonstrate the ability to write a lucid blog post? How many should touch on media literacy, video composition, local and global inequities in technology resources, or the ethics of Photoshop? If we have 600 classes posting syllabi online but only 50 using discussion boards actively, is that enough? Do our students feel that learning is a 21st century activity and are we equipping them to do it for themselves for the rest of their lives?
To me there are a lot of reasons to use technology in teaching, and I've already blogged about some of them: more time on the task at hand outside of the classroom, more writing and reading experience, more opportunities for feedback, more accommodation for different learning styles. But there's one compelling reason I keep coming back to figuring out what to do next: because our students practically live online, but they don't learn there. It would be a shame (yes, I said this in The Chronicle years ago, I'm still recycling the line,) it would be a shame if the only things our students couldn't do online is learn.
The right number of teachers using technology and the right number of technology-enhanced classes is whatever number it takes to make sure that all of our students have a chance to learn how to learn using these tools. The right number is whatever number it takes to convince them that learning is a 21st-century activity, not a 19th-century one. The right number is whatever it takes to get them engaged and active now and not thinking that a class is just a hurdle to jump over.
I don't know what that number is, but I have been worrying for more than 15 years that we're somewhere below that number, and the worry is juuuuuust starting to get a good grip.
I've been worried about higher education's relationship to communication technologies since, oh, about 1994. Clearly not every class needs a technology component; clearly technology should only be used to serve the class' learning goals. But how much is too much, and how much is not enough? Not every faculty member needs to be able to communicate using 21st century methods. But how many should? Not every student needs guidance in being a digital citizen. But how many is the right number?
The Chronicle and other reports on higher education are filled with fear and numbers. How many credit hours will be required for students to get financial aid? How much profit is for-profit education making? At what age should professors retire? How much does it cost a student to earn a degree versus how much will they earn in the career they get after they earn it?
Few ask the overarching questions. Politicians don't like such questions because they don't lead to good soundbites and faculty don't always like them either. I hear way too many people on campuses responding to these questions with the answers "everyone knows" - unexamined. They're uncomfortable questions when they seem like challenges to the status quo. What is the purpose of higher education? If it is to educate workers and not citizens, what should our curricula look like? Likewise if it is to educate citizens and not workers? What should a college-educated person know or be able to do? What are our responsibilities as faculty to change higher education in general?
And then the technology-related subquestions: what should a college graduate know about networking or digital security? What should they know about digital privacy? What will the educated citizen or worker do with the technological resources available to him or her through the rest of his life? How should college be preparing our students to do those activities?
Then here's the real kicker: How long can we ignore these questions?
Most leading colleges and universities are struggling with the same questions and activities that we are. We have many digital resources - but not an infinite amount. To what should we be allocating our resources? This always leads me back to the same questions I ask myself: How many classes using technology is the right number? How many faculty should be tweeting, how many should be wiki-ing, how many should teach students what code looks like, how many should expect students to demonstrate the ability to write a lucid blog post? How many should touch on media literacy, video composition, local and global inequities in technology resources, or the ethics of Photoshop? If we have 600 classes posting syllabi online but only 50 using discussion boards actively, is that enough? Do our students feel that learning is a 21st century activity and are we equipping them to do it for themselves for the rest of their lives?
To me there are a lot of reasons to use technology in teaching, and I've already blogged about some of them: more time on the task at hand outside of the classroom, more writing and reading experience, more opportunities for feedback, more accommodation for different learning styles. But there's one compelling reason I keep coming back to figuring out what to do next: because our students practically live online, but they don't learn there. It would be a shame (yes, I said this in The Chronicle years ago, I'm still recycling the line,) it would be a shame if the only things our students couldn't do online is learn.
The right number of teachers using technology and the right number of technology-enhanced classes is whatever number it takes to make sure that all of our students have a chance to learn how to learn using these tools. The right number is whatever number it takes to convince them that learning is a 21st-century activity, not a 19th-century one. The right number is whatever it takes to get them engaged and active now and not thinking that a class is just a hurdle to jump over.
I don't know what that number is, but I have been worrying for more than 15 years that we're somewhere below that number, and the worry is juuuuuust starting to get a good grip.
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