EdTechTrek

After sitting through a number of presentations, it seems to me that most presenters feel, implicitly or explicitly, that they are the most important part of the content that they are presenting. Undoubtedly, there are still some very gifted presenter/orators out there who could, as Paula Abdul says on American Idol, “sing the phonebook”. However, most of us simply try to get our point across without being too boring or dull.

The beauty of technology is that it allows us to do more than we are capable of doing on our own and it frees us up to focus on what we do best while letting the technology do what it does best. In this case, it allows us to fairly easily record our presentation slides, with or without video of ourselves as presenters, but certainly with our voice narration (and with a interactivew whiteboard, record pen notation as well), and make those presentations available on the Internet to be viewed by our “audience” at their own leisure. Sure, you can’t then poll your audience or check for understanding… or even enter into a discussion. But, I would argue that most presentations don’t really allow for these types of interactions and wait for the presentation to conclude before any serious discussion – if any at all.

In a recent post by Jon Becker, he notes that many professional presentation could be recorded a few weeks ahead of a meeting or conference and listened to at one’s own leisure prior to attending session(s). This would free up much needed time to discuss meaty content rather than just absorb it and move on.

Below is a video on how one school is approaching “content delivery” and homework. Homework has changed from worksheets and difficult to complete assignments to listening/watching teacher presentations of content (homework) to be discussed and worked with in class. This frees up class time for more active learning – exploring, testing, discussing, experimentation, trouble-shooting,… the very critical learning events that often get shortchanged due to time constraints. With a new generation of media junkies and students who thrive on new forms of media, it seems to be a no-brainer. Content can new be watched on computer screens, portable media devices like ipods, or even cell phones, making it that much more accessible. Of course, not all types of learning are appropriate for this medium, but certainly those that are primarily delivering content are. Viewers, then, also have the added benefit of being able to listen to/watch the presentation or key parts multiple times to grasp complex concepts or big ideas. This way, getting left behind or becoming distracted/losing focus never needs to be a problem.

I think we could all think about how to better use our face-to-face time (which best maximizes the expertise of teachers) while taking advantage of the many synchronous and asynchronous teaching/learning opportunities out there. WE are not the best part of the content. WE are not “all that”.

Just had to share this cartoon… Kids certainly do have a different perspective of technologies that we often consider “new fangled”, cutting edge… These technologies are part of their DNA – the fabric of their daily lives. Just as in talking to God/prayer and the very concept of God, children often have a much more simplistic, yet authentic view of God. Understanding how children perceive technology in their own lives gives us very important information about how we need to consider its use in the classroom. Too often we limit it based on our own understandings and perceptions/misperceptions.

So, read and laugh! You will need to click on in it to view the entire cartoon.

So, I have not posted in a while. Sometimes life is like that. I used to get stressed about not posting frequently enough, but I got over that quickly. There have been so many things whirling around in my mind lately, and it has been hard to focus on any one in particular. I must say, that there is something about sitting down and writing that is powerful – whether it be journaling in the traditional sense or journaling in a public and social forum such as this. I can recall keeping a reflexive journal during my dissertation research and usually the most interesting thoughts and even epiphanies emerged from that process. Sitting down and writing is really about sitting down and thinking. We need to give ourselves time to think critically and reflect. Writing is simply a valuable way to do this and document those thought processes at the same time… two for one! Here is what has gripped me over the past few weeks:

1. Incredible resources and conversations shared and taken place on Twitter
2. Educon2.1 sessions webcast via Mogulus
3. Fantastic discussions in class with my students
4. Some excellent student blog posts
5. Volunteering in my son’s first grade classroom
6. Some excellent Elluminate sessions
7. Seeing how kids’ needs are not being met in school
8. Struggling to find a balance between “keeping up” with information and “digesting” information
9. Laundry
10. Technical problems
11. Struggling to find a balance between “keeping up” with information and “digesting” information

Carol Daunt Skyring tagged me in a meme that’s doing the rounds of Plurk & Twitter. I figured that some readers may find a few things about me interesting to know. I’ll try to keep them out of the ordinary as much as I can.

Here are seven things about me that you may not know:

1. I grew up on a small hobby farm in the eastern part of the Canadian province of Québec. Milking cows and goats was NOT my daily highlight!
2. My elementary school of 200 in Mansonville now has a 1:1 laptop program, part of a larger initiative in the Eastern Townships.
3. During college, I bicycled 2/3 of the way across Canada, from Vancouver to eastern Ontario, with best friend. We cycled around Cape Breton Island the following summer. I still want to cycle through Europe, especially through the areas of the Tour de France.
4. I was an elementary music teacher in Toronto and took a ferry to work which was at a small school on Center Island in the Toronto harbor.
5. I swam in the waters off Hong Kong, not knowing that the area was prime shark habitat.
6. I was bitten by an octopus while in the southern Caribbean.
7. I taught at Ball State University’s K-12 lab school Burris (Muncie, IN), working daily with a huge number of preservice teachers, which gave me incentive to go back to school there and get my Ph.D.

I’m tagging:
@briansmith
@elenorsturtle
@matthewtabor
@dwaltman
@Jazzymiles

To participate, each person tagged should list seven things about themselves that would help their Personal Learning Network get to know them a little better. You can link back to this post by leaving a comment here, which links forward to their your update. Add yourself to the growing list of people who have revealed 7 things.

We have all read or heard the popular criticisms of the ubiquitous presentation tool, PowerPoint. [Scoring Power Points, Is It Finally Time to Ditch PowerPoint?, PowerPoint is Evil, Pointing in the Wrong Direction, Chicken, chicken, chicken, How Not to Use PowerPoint,...] A while ago I purchased the short read, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within by Edward R. Tufte.

Over the holidays I finally found a moment’s peace to sit down and read it – a read that had been recommended by many folks who have an interest in issues surrounding effective use of tools for teaching and learning. I must say that I was sorely disappointed in Tufte’s presentation of ideas. The 31 page bound article was just about 30 pages too long. Here’s the synopsis:

PowerPoint by design leads to fragmentation and oversimplification of ideas. It should not be used as the sole means to communicate [important] ideas and it is often used to mask shallow knowledge and poor presentation ability. In fact, PowerPoint may indeed benefit the bottom 10% of all presenters as it forces them to have points and follow them.

There you have it. You don’t have to go and read it now.

Well, to be fair, Tufte provides a number of critical examples where slideware negatively impacted the communication of critical ideas. But, there is so much repetition and redundancy in his narrative that it made me want to skim and even put it aside.

My biggest disagreement with the ideas presented is that Tufte seems to imply quite clearly that PowerPoint holds a great deal of the responsibility for [mis]communicating ideas represented on the slides. Tufte criticizes PowerPoint’s inherent design in that it forces big and complex ideas to become oversimplified, abbreviated, watered down, paraphrased, and fragmented because the rich detail required to fully comprehend cannot be contained on sequential slides. He argues that the slideware presentation tool harms content. He argues that a better presentation tool should be word processed documents. To quote Tufte,

“To make smarter presentations, try smarter tools. Technical reports are smarter than PowerPoint. Sentences are smarter than the grunts of bullet points. PP templates for statistical graphics and data tables are hopeless…For making serious presentations, replace PP with word-processing or page-layout software.”

Where I disagree is in the idea that PowerPoint is smart at all. PowerPoint is not a method. PowerPoint holds no power to “harm content”. It is not meant to provide copious amounts of detail. It is not best used as a stand-alone presentation. It requires an audience who can critically listen. It requires a well-informed presenter who can effectively present and engage. I do agree that PowerPoint makes it deceptively easy to be a bad presenter. However, that is not PowerPoint’s fault. When did we stop thinking and allow tools to dictate what is effective? In agreement with Tufte, we have done that. But this just amplifies the larger problem of learning “from” tools rather than learning, as David Jonassen writes, “in partnership with” them. Sure, PowerPoint should not replace true research and effective written and oral communication. But to suggest that all presenters should make serious presentations with word processed documents fails to get the root of the problem here, namely, the presenter. Certainly, providing an audience with technical reports or research papers that hold the critical details of concepts being presented has great value. And, the act of writing a paper first and not just creating a presentation is often an essential step in learning the content first in order to present it effectively to others. Too often teachers have assigned a PowerPoint project that facilitates cut and paste thinking and shallow understanding. The result is often a terrible presentation AND little learning to show from all of that time spent on designing the presentation. But, the act of researching and writing a paper does not guarantee a good presentation of those ideas.

The really honest statement that Tufte makes in all of this is the following:

“The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.”

PowerPoint is not evil. It holds no authority over content. Yes – understand its limitations. However, blaming the tool does nothing to get to the root of the issues, which IMHO are poor research skills and shallow research, no critical thinking, insufficient preparation (which often should include a written analysis of some kind), and poor presentation skills.