For the first time in my life, I made a Powerpoint presentation. Look, here it is:
Whee!
I have always hated Powerpoint. I tend to agree with the observation that Powerpoint is evil. Steve Simon lists the many critics of Powerpoint, and it does have its defenders, such as Don Norman. It seems everyone’s a critic. I’m a critic, too. I’ve had to endure far too many meetings during which ghastly, boring, Powerpoint presentations are trotted out, requiring you to stare at a screen on which is the complete text of whatever it is the speaker is droning on about: look, either simply hand out your speech, or eliminate the Powerpoint, or just flash through the Powerpoint and shut up! Not to mention people who freeze up if their Powerpoint fails to work as programmed.
But after viewing the presentations of Steve Jobs, and articles such as Presentation Zen’s Gates, Jobs, & The Zen Aesthetic, widely discussed and linked to, I changed my mind. It helped that Apple has had Keynote, its own presentation software, for a year now. I have a visceral reaction to most Microsoft programs (though I still haven’t weaned myself away from Word and Entourage): I found Powerpoint particularly unpleasant to use. Keynote is another story altogether.
With the help of this student’s guide for using Keynote, I managed to whip together the Keynote presentation I exported to Powerpoint (above).
This leads to my column for today, which is Learning and teaching through the internet.
And, as I told the teachers in Baguio and mentioned in my column, here’s a rundown of the websites and blogs I mentioned during my talk:
The definition of critical thinking that I used came from the Public Speaking Glossary. Also, check out Critical Thinking Community and Critical Thinking Web with online tutorials.
Then, there’s Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. I pointed to Wikipedia as the source of the definition of ICT I used.
Research examples: these were examples I used to illustrate the vast research potential of the Internet:
Philippine Photographs Digital Archive
The Philippine Revolution by Apolinario Mabini (the Leon Ma. Guerrero translation); there is also a Tagalog translation, Himagsikang Pilipino.
For the use of information technology for collaborative work, I pointed to Writely (which I discovered via The New Web).
Examples of sharing:
Chris Sundita’s Salita Blog
For examples of adding to the knowledge base:
The Philippine Presidency Project
Examples of “unleashed thinkers”:
How ICT can make you a better teacher:
I gave them the example of Mila Aguilar and her blog for her Students of English. Her own thoughts and poetry, as well as the papers submitted by her students, are featured in the blog.
Incidentally, a good guide for public speaking is Guy Kawasaki’s How to get a standing ovation.
It’s funny you used the term “unleashed thinkers”. I’m ten miles away from being considered a thinker but I just opened a new blog two days ago at http://thudsplat.blogspot.com. I used the tagline Unleashed. Unwrapped. Unlinked. What are the odds?
Just want to sound that off. As well as quietly plug my new blog…
You should try sitting through ppts by b-school students. godawful comes to mind.
my design school friends and I seriously considered running a ppt consultancy for the money grubbing mbas.
my general rule for presentations: don’t tell me what I can read myself.
hi i read your article in today’s Inquirer (1-30-2006) and they spelled Writely as Writerly. maybe you should tell them that they printed it wrong.
Powerpoint has sooooo many bells and whistles that people use PPT just to play with the fancy bells and whistles and forget the point of powerpoint is to aid their presentation.
My experience with PowerPoint is quite fair, I had good times and I had bad times. The thing I hate about it the most is the incompatibility issues like if you made your presentation with say Windows XP and MS Office 2003 XP, complete with your effects, sounds and transitions and animations, you’d go nuts when you find out that some of those nifty tricks you put in will not work and even ruin your presentation if you run it in a pc that runs on Windows 98 or 2000 and with a different version of MS Office.
I installed Open Office (the free Open-source counterpart of MS Office) but has barely touched its Presentation maker. I still have to free my self from Gates’ mindspell.
I like your blog Man. This is great. Sometimes when entering your blog, I can hardly get out of the good links you have.
Sincerely yours,
Kalovsk Itim
Powerpoint
You only use that in Businesss school
where a presentor uses bullet points
then ad libs
why waste electricity
some senior managenment accepts manila paper
hand written presentations
most if not all would want a hand out maybe for contemplation purposes ,or maybe they lack paper towels.
nasa nagdadala yan!!!
as I have mentioned MLQ has been developing his rapport with students and now even teachers….
Miss commenting btw
Karl Garcia
Critical thinking:
We commentors or commentators have been doing that by reading blogs which are a also a result of such….
in this blog of mlq where as i call it a “spicy” variety
you would love reading it because of the many flavors of his blogs…..I admit that some topics make me an ignoramus like the arts and medieval practices…
good thing that this blog is very informative too!
back to ppt…As I said again in a typo filled comment above…Managers or whomever your audience are; are concerned if you could answer their questions…even if you overload them with info..
using that in the case of this blog
MLQ uses links, where it is your choice if you click none or click all…
I tried both and when i choose to click none…i regret it later then I decide to click on them eventually as I read back issues….
For movie buffs, you can download for free the first ever Dracula movie, “Nosferatu” (circa 1922), for your collection. This is a classic. Link courtesy of google:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6185283610506001721&q=public+domain