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ES512 Video: Guidance for presenting online

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ES512 Video: Guidance for presenting online

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PowerPoint (PPT) is frequently criticised for being a presenter-oriented approach. This is because many presenters use their decks as teleprompters rather than as tools to help communicate their message. This results in presentations that lack energy and slides with too much text.

Despite the criticism, PPT is after all only a delivery system for presenting the information. When used correctly, it can be a very useful tool that can facilitate better communication and more impactful presentations.

This article is designed to help presenters create learner-centred slides, which in turn will facilitate better delivery. The following principles can be applied to any presentation program that facilitates the sharing of ideas via imagery, text, audio and video.

Presenters can align decks with learner requirements by creating personas.
One tool that presenters can modify to understand their audience is the Value Proposition Canvas (VPC). The VPC can be used to ensure that a product (or presentation) is positioned around what the beneficiary (or learner) values and needs.

To support clarity, each slide should contain one overarching thought or idea.

In practice, this means no more than one chart or one image per slide. Multiple charts or images on a slide can obscure the point and frustrate cognition.

Use the "3-second rule" which states that presentations are glance media so messages on slides should be processed by the audience within 3 seconds.

Avoid "triple delivery". This is where the same text is on the screen, spoken aloud and printed on handouts. When this is done, auditory, reading and visual processing are all downgraded. Good decks are not designed to replace reading or listening to lectures.

Headings are often used in place of headlines. Headings are fine to use when the deck is being created to demarcate sections however when it comes to presenting, remove cognitive friction by placing the most important information in the slide at the top of the slide, rather than a description of the slide, followed by the most important information.

Larger, wider, and capitalised text outperforms smaller, narrow, lowercase text. A rule of thumb is to use 30-point, left-aligned text in a sans-serif font.

Choose contrasting colours to make the deck readable. Avoid using red and green combinations which are difficult to separate for colour blind people.

Some authors recommend not using a white background as the glare can steal attention from the speaker.

If decks are to be used as visual aids, it makes sense to make use of imagery. Presenters need to think carefully about how to transfer their ideas into engaging images. The point is to make your material easier to understand as opposed to decorating slides.

Imagery can also help people recall information when it is delivered in a combination of pictures, oration and text.

To facilitate the construction of new knowledge and reduce cognitive load, it can be useful to utilise progressive disclosure by building and explaining diagrams via multiple slides. By doing this, you can imbue context, sequence and association.

Design is not about making aesthetically pleasing slides. It is about being an advocate for the person who you are presenting to and making sure that the design is consistent with what you are trying to communicate. This leads to three concluding points.

First, PPT should not replace independent reading. This means that slides are not a place to condense the speaker's knowledge into bullet points. In fact, well-designed slides contain very little text, use large font, have one image per slide and one key idea or theme per slide.

Second, it takes time to craft learner-centred slides. As a rule of thumb, it can take at the very least 30 hours to create a 30 slide deck. You can add 3 hours of rehearsal on top of this. After all, slides should not be a visual crutch for the presenter.

Finally, getting a message out of one brain and into another is hard work. The goal for educators should be to utilise the interdependence between their ideas, their slides and their delivery to maximise comprehension.

Clark, J. (2008) 'PowerPoint and Pedagogy: Maintaining Student Interest in University Lectures', College Teaching, 56(1), pp. 39-44.
Craig, R.J. and Amernic, J.H. (2006) 'PowerPoint Presentation Technology and the Dynamics of Teaching', Innovative Higher Education, 31(3), pp. 147-160.

Davies, R. (2021) Everything I know about life I learned from PowerPoint. PROFILE BOOKS LTD.

Duarte, N. (2008) Slide:ology: the art and science of creating great presentations. 1st ed. Beijing ; Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly

Media.

Elliott, S. and Gordon, M. (2006) 'Using PowerPoint to Promote Constructivist Learning', Educational Technology, 46(4),

pp. 34-38.

Godin, S. (2007) 'Really Bad PowerPoint', 29 January. Available at: https://seths.blog/2007/01/really_bad_powe/

Osterwalder, A. et al. (2014) Value proposition design. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons (Strategyzer series).

Richard Mayer and Moreno, R. (2005) 'A Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning: Implications for Design Principles', in

The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. Cambridge University Press.

Tufte, E.R. (1997) Visual explanations: images and quantities, evidence and narrative. Cheshire, Conn: Graphics Press.

Tufte, E.R. (2006) The cognitive style of PowerPoint: pitching out corrupts within. 2nd ed. Cheshire, Conn: Graphics Press.

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PowerPoint (PPT) is frequently criticised for being a presenter-oriented approach. This is because many presenters use their decks as teleprompters rather than as tools to help communicate their message. This results in presentations that lack energy and slides with too much text. Despite the criticism, PPT is after all only a delivery system for presenting the information.

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February 23rd - SlIDESHOW - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deMfF-xt6cM

“A photograph shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.”
― Amit Kalantri
“Make (we make instead of Take photos) 20 photos that tell a story of what best describes your passions/interests/values. Basically some theme that is meaningful to you”
Add a caption to your photo - this should capture the essence of what your photo is
all about and is part of the telling of the story
Technically, please include at least one of each of these shots:
(1) Landscape Shot
(2) Portrait Shot
(3) High Angle
(4) Two Shot
(5) Low Angle
(6) Medium /Mid Shot
(7) Close up
(8) Medium Close up
(9) Single Shot
(10) Three shot

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Sean and Emer's Danone Ad, Saturday 12th February 2022

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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1. Pitch: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jwaKs12s86IdPV7Acoe5Mm2yXHc6yiEf7hxUCA4jm38/edit?usp=sharing

2. Storyboard: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1IarqJle8ESEwLs-tjxBXfs5eSgloJhEn/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=113757284650920187463&rtpof=true&sd=true

3. Video:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-1ppZW2UMJ0-e9IB73xHT5qnKs-68yw6/view?usp=sharing

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Reflecting on my educational values, 16th October, 2021

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Reflecting on my educational values, 16th October, 2021

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On 16th October 2021, I was attending a weekend workshop in DCU as part of my Masters in Education and Training. I recall an exercise where…

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Reflection: Considerations for facilitating learning at conferences

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Reflection: Considerations for facilitating learning at conferences

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Considerations for facilitating learning at conferences

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Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.

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AFL: Reflecting on the creation of learning assets

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AFL: Reflecting on the creation of learning assets

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Recently I've been reflecting on the subject of knowledge creation and knowledge management. A big part of an educator's job is knowledge creation. That is, being able to analyse and synthesise different sources of information with a view to remixing that information and creating new knowledge. That is a difficult thing to do. It requires higher-order thinking.

Spending my time researching topics with a view to synthesising that knowledge and creating something new for a specific audience isn't an easy thing to do. It goes way beyond understanding a new topic. Firstly you need to think about how sophisticated your own learning of a topic needs to be before you teach it. And you need to think about how sophisticated or complex you want your learner's understanding to be.

A useful framework for thinking about this is Bloom's Taxonomy (this is the revised version by Anderson & Krathwohl in 2001):

Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The items are intended to become more cognitively demanding as you go up the pyramid. For example, remembering something is not as sophisticated as understanding. Equally, understanding is easier than evaluating. Educators can use the taxonomy as a progression. For example, you have to understand before you can analyse.

According to Blooms taxonomy, understanding and knowledge acquisition are lower order thinking skills. Research and the creation of new knowledge requires analysis, synthesis and evaluation. These are higher order thinking skills.

Sharp (2009: 3) defined research simply as 'finding things
Qut'. This is fine for collecting facts and figures but from a learning point of view, how can we create a process to absorb the things we find out and then use higher-order thinking to come up with something new?

If I were asked to reflect on that question and provide an answer, I'd start with something like: Synthesising new learning with a view to extending and expanding that knowledge requires cognitive effort in the form of intensity of focus multiplied by time and periods of reflection. Of course, what appears simple, is not necessarily easy. It can take time to understand new and abstract topics. Even then, more time is required to embed that new understanding and become comfortable retrieving or recalling that new knowledge fluently.

A further challenge to moving from lower-order thinking to higher-order thinking is how to start drawing connections between those topics that have been learned. Connecting topics and formulating new ideas, frameworks and hypotheses is a creative process. This is what I find particularly difficult as a researcher and educator. It's messy. There's a mysticism associated with creativity. For me, it feels like I just need to wrestle with the new topics until new ideas start to emerge. This can take time which isn't always available if I'm on a deadline to create a report or piece of training material. (Schön, 1983) talked about the swampy lowland. Moving from lower order thinking to higher order thinking feels messy. It's when I find myself in the swamp and it's like I just need to keep trudging along until I find my way out.

I have great admiration for professional researchers who can publish paper after paper of high quality work. I don't know how they do it. Maybe they are more intelligent than I am. It's a distinct possibility!

I spent a long time working in Dublin City University where colleagues used to nudge me to consider doing a PhD. But the thoughts of undertaking that scale of research terrify me. I'm not sure I fancy being stuck in the swamp for that long.

A challenge for people who need to create training material and new knowledge is creating a process to do that. Personally, anytime I've had to write a report whether that is for work, or for a college assignment I've found the process to be stressful and messy.

I find the process very difficult and often I find myself reading lots of different sources but never quite managing to pull in all the points from those sources into the new material that I'm trying to create. And so it occurs to me that surely for academics, and professional researchers there must be a more efficient and effective way to manage one's own learning and to create new knowledge. With that in mind, I've been thinking a lot about the different tools and tactics that I can use in order to improve my own process.

Towards a digital knowledge management toolbox

Transcription: Recently, I have been trying new tools, such as Otter.ai, a transcription tool to record and transcribe streams of thought.

Document management: I have been using a tool called Diigo which allows me to read documents online and highlight passages that I think are relevant and noteworthy. By doing that, I can then export those highlights from Diigo and to capture the highlights from that document into a central place like.

Schemogenic thinking tools: I've also been using slideware and digital whiteboard tools recently to help me to structure my thoughts. For example, I've been using Mural to add digital post-its which I can then move around and arrange in different ways to visualise relationships between bits of knowledge. It's almost like kinaesthetic learning. I can look at knowledge from different points of view and see how my thoughts are structured in front of me.

Once I've settled on a structure, I can start to write a document based on the structure of the cards or the structure of my Mural board. This approach aligns with an idea I had about PowerPoint. I've observed that for decks I have created in the past, if I look at PowerPoint in slide sorter view I can see a schema for my knowledge on the topic of that deck.

Another low fidelity technology that I've been testing for that kind of schemogenic thinking is to use blank playing cards. What I've done with blank playing cards is write notes on the cards which I can then move around to observe relationships between the notes and how they might be best structured holistically. This is useful for reflecting on how that knowledge is structured in my mind but equally it's useful to help me create new material because I can move those cards around and mix them with cards from other topics to come up with new ideas.

Personal note management: For years I have been taking notes and recording those notes within the OneNote app. However, a challenge of this is that those notes are taken in a linear way and they're stored in a way that does not support retrieval or connecting notes to each other.

Recently I've been investigating a new generation of note-taking apps. These include tools like Obsidian, Notion and Roam research.

- Obsidian is a note-taking and knowledge management app that promises to let you turn a collection of text files into a network of linked thought.

- Roam Research (from what I can tell) promises similar functionality. It's a note-taking application that unlike OneNote, provides the functionality to connect notes using something called "networked thought" - which essentially produces relationships between notes you've created.

- Notion also allows you to take notes but it can also be used for project management and collaboration.

These tools are interesting because their promise is that they allow people to take notes while also enabling the connection of those notes to see the relationships between those notes. For example, imagine I use one of these tools for daily journalling. Over time I can start to see themes in those entries because the tools allow me to create a visual map based on keywords etc. As I write, I can also add tags to represent ideas, insights and inspirations. Instead of those ideas getting lost in multiple physical journals, I can pull them all together with the click of a button. In that sense, they promise to expand your memory and ability to produce new work.

Something that I would like to do in my research is investigate these tools with a view to creating a process for capturing notes with a view to efficiently retrieving and remixing those notes and creating new material in future. If I can do that, I think it will increase both the volume and the quality of my output and decrease the stress and confusion that I sometimes feel when I am working on a research project. This could be useful for me as an individual content creator however I think a more powerful use case might be for organisations that need to create a lot of content in the form of reports, videos and elearning. For example, a typical scenario in my organisation is that we write a report about a marketing related topic. Somebody takes ownership of that report and works through the origination, research and production of the report by themselves in whatever manner works best for them. Once the report is produced to a high enough standard and in good time, nobody really pays any attention to artefacts that were created throughout the research process. Artefacts might include ideas for future content, well-written and unused content and of course the research content itself. Imagine this can all be strategically stored in a networked note-taking tool. All of these bits of content become assets which can be retrieved and repurposed for future content projects. This idea has commercial merit because in non-academic report writing, there's a lot of content that get rewritten over and over. If that content can exist as assets, it can be retrieved and slotted into new reports as required, thereby reducing the time it takes to produce new content.

There are two obstacles to overcome to create this kind of research process.

1. Firstly, each of these tools comes with a high learning curve. This means that I'd need to invest a lot of time investigating these tools and identifying variables to evaluate them.

2. Secondly, technology is never the solution in its own right. It is the strategic deployment of the technology. Utilising these tools for research will require either the creation of or the deployment of a methodology for knowledge capture, knowledge mixing and knowledge creation.

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Recently I've been reflecting on the subject of knowledge creation and knowledge management. A big part of an educator's job is knowledge creation. That is, being able to analyse and synthesise different sources of information with a view to remixing that information and creating new knowledge. That is a difficult thing to do.

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Reflecting on self-judgement and deep work, 7th April 2022

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Reflecting on self-judgement and deep work, 7th April 2022

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Here's an equation that described how what deep work tends to look like for me:

Time*(Long periods of distraction+Flashes of focus)+Lots of guilt=Output

When I need to do any kind of research, be it for work or education, I tend to let it stress me out. Research projects fill my waking hours because I seem to spend a lot of time stressing about what I have to rather than actually doing it. This illustration from Alex Maese Juarez reminds me of me.

Self-judgement
I spent a long time working in Dublin City University where colleagues used to nudge me to consider doing a PhD. But the thoughts of undertaking that scale of research terrify me. I'm not sure I fancy being stuck in the swamp for that long.

Instead of getting on with work, I feel guilty if I'm not making progress as quickly as I'd like. If I were to do a PhD, I envision myself missing out on family holidays and special occasions because I don't have the confidence to get my work done in a disciplined and timely fashion. The reality of course is that while the nature of research means that a topic can expand as you dig into it, my own personal judgements about what constitutes meaningful work and progress actually hinders me from doing deep and meaningful work. I know that part of my challenge is that I find it hard to align the idea of reading about a topic for several hours as "work". Work has inputs and outputs and when the outputs don't come quickly, it's easy to get disheartened and make judgements about progress that may not be accurate.
Towards deep work
I'm on a quest to live a deeper life. Deeper relationships. Deeper work. Deeper engagement in every moment. With regard to work and study, I want to use my mind to its fullest capacity. To do this I need to dial down my propensity to get distracted by personal judgements about performance and dial up my capacity to focus.

If I can do this I can update my equation for deep work. I'd like to borrow an equation from Cal Newport who defines high-quality work as time spent multiplied by intensity of focus.

Time*Intensity of focus = High-quality work

By dialling up intensity of focus and dialling down the time it takes to get work done, I'll be more effective. I'll be happier. And I'll have more time for unconscious, diffused thinking.

How can I do this? Here's what I'm working on:

Step 1: Work in Pomodoro sprints of 25 minutes on and 5 minutes off. During the 5 minutes off, relax. Step away from the desk. Look out the window. Breath. Don't look at social media. That's still focused thinking.

Step 2: Bring attention to my breath. Investigations into the physiological effects of slow breathing have uncovered significant effects on the respiratory, cardiovascular, cardiorespiratory and autonomic nervous systems. It's the effects on the autonomic nervous system that I'm most interested in. Breathing deeply, with a slow and steady inhalation to exhalation ratio, signals our parasympathetic nervous system to calm the body down. When I was younger I became an Emergency First Responder. One of the things we learned is that a normal breathing rate should be 16-18 breaths per minute. Nowadays, science indicates that long, deep breaths, an average of around 6 breaths per minute can manage our stress responses to help decrease anxiety, fear, racing thoughts and rapid heartbeat. This requires conscious breathing. Whenever I relax, I've been trying to become aware of my breathing so I can slow it down. I try to breathe in for a count of 6 and out for a count of 8. That seems to work out at around 5 breaths per minute.

I've also been doing Wim Hof breathing since January. To be honest, his methodology is completely contrary to slowing your breathing down. In fact, it's controlled hyper ventilation. But I always feel energised afterwards.

Step 3: Go for walks at lunchtime. Nietzsche said, "It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth". Charles Darwin had a thinking path. While working on his theory of evolution, he took a daily walk to exercise his mind and body. He'd walk the same route through shady woods and back along a hedge-lined field. He called it his 'thinking path' as it was on these walks that he worked on his theories and ground-breaking book 'On The Origin Of Species'. If he had a particularly challenging problem to consider, he would walk for longer. Isn't that interesting? For many people, there's an assumption that if you're not at your desk, you're not being productive. But in actual fact for a lot of creative or research work, maybe the most productive thing you can do is get away from your desk. Go for a long walk, preferably in nature.

Step 5: Don't be afraid to take breaks. This is related to going for walks. Desktime, a company that develops desktop productivity software, has looked at the results of their users and determined that, on average, the ideal break for maximum productivity would be to take 17 minutes off for every 52 minutes of work. Imagine you went missing for 17 minutes every 52 minutes at work. You'd be fired! Mind you, maybe smokers intuitively get this. I wonder is there research that indicates smokers are more productive?

Step 6: Nap. I used to think that if I ever had the chance to work from home, I'd lay on the couch during my lunch break. I'd watch some TV and I'd snooze. I've never done it. Not even once. But Daniel Pink writes in his book "When: that a 10- to 20-minute nap can provide the napper with three hours of improved focus and a higher capacity for retaining information. He also writes about what he calls a napuccino. Studies have shown that a cup of coffee before a nap can give you an even better boost. Since caffeine takes about 20 minutes to enter the bloodstream, it's actually perfect for incorporating into a well-timed nap. Some day I'll get around to trying this. I'll drink my coffee and I'll set my timer for 20 minutes so I can wake up ready to take on the world!

Step 7. Stack new habits. Habits are a central part of our lives; we all live with good and bad habits. The goal is to double down on the good ones and prune the bad ones.

Actually, we're prone to falling into habitual behaviours when we're stressed. In the book Mini Habits by Stephen Guise, the author cites a study at UCLA that uncovered human beings' tendency to revert to habitual behavior when under pressure, tired or overwhelmed. Unfortunately, this happens whether the habits are good or bad for us. And so when we're stressed, we're less capable of making good decisions so we resort to habits. The good news is that bad habits can be changed. They are, after all, just neural pathways in the brain. They get thicker the more they're used, and deteriorate when neglected. You create your own habits simply by repeating good activities until they get easier and easier or stop doing bad activities until they get easier. Of course habits worth stacking are taking breaks, bringing awareness to breathing, going for walks. The more you do them, the more they become part of your essential being.

By the way, if anything I've written here reads as preachy, it's not meant to be that way. I write to think. I write to remind myself about how I'd like to live rather than tell other people how to live. Hopefully that makes sense.

A final thing that occurs to me is that some of the things I've mentioned are not new. They're as old as time. And yet we still need to be reminded about them. Isn't that odd? It's like we allow the hustle and bustle of daily life to get in the way of our own knowing. Our own wisdom.

Step 8: Trust my own wisdom. Truth be told we all know when we're tired. When we're hungry. When it's time to take a break. But often we don't listen because we respond to external pressures of deadlines and social pressures. Maybe if we all trusted our own knowing we'd be more productive. We'd be more relaxed. We'd be happier. Maybe we'd even earn more? Discuss!

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Reflecting on self-judgement & deep work

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When I need to do any kind of research, be it for work or education, I tend to let it stress me out. Research projects fill my waking hours because I seem to spend a lot of time stressing about what...

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Using any of the following, design your conference poster using the content of your ES515
assignment. You must include a reference section also.
(i) Canva, (ii) Glogster, (iii) Pages or (iv) Keynote or any authoring tool you wish

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Heading - Poster by Sean Patrick Donnelly