Had a great presentation yesterday and though i’d take the opportunity to lay out what i did and how the process of building live slides works. It’s pretty simple really.
The theory
Well… it may be a surprise to my mom… but i don’t know everything. Not even close. There’s a sense in which being invited to present at a conference, that you are the expert coming in to notify the locals of what they should know. You could also be presenting your own work, or, say, trying to explain a particular point… and live slides might not be best for that. Lets assume you have a broad topic like I was given for this presentation “the future of libraries”.
I’m not a librarian.
So what i decide to do is offer a platform for that discussion and a lens through which it might be useful to examine the discussion. Below are the slides that i put together with a series of questions that are about the work that i do – openness, literacies, digital stuff, learning, rhizomes – all focused towards the topic of libraries. The questions start at a controversial but audience focused (audience was supposed to be mostly librarians) so the first question i asked was “what is a library”.
I took these slides and put them into an eluminate room kindly borrowed from George Siemens and then invited some friends to come along. So, now we have 15 people in a room (i had fifty five on the first go around) and 11 questions on 13 slides. (first slide is a doodle slide to get people accustomed to doodling and the last a participant slide) We go through the questions and the “live slide guide” (me in this case) starts the discussion going. What is a library…? the audience posts their ideas into the slides… I do approx 5 min on each slide and try and present the slides as they are being built, using my own perspectives on the topic brought in through the questions and blending them with the ideas coming live from the collaborators in the elluminate conference. After 50 minutes the slides look like they do below.
At the same time, I was also doing a screencapture of the whole eluminate conference so i could post it later. The fine folks at archive.org seem willing to host this kind of stuff for us… here’s the direct link to the big video… embed below.
For me
I love working this way. I learn from the audience, my prep time is lower, and I think people are far more engaged. Both times i’ve done this people seem to have had a good time. I think we learned interesting things. The title of this presentation changed after we did it… it focused far more on literacies than i was expecting and made some very interesting links between teachers and librarians (actually, several people thought there was really no difference)
More theory
I think this presents a far more realistic vision for knowledge. When asked a question like “what is a library” a single person has to come down to a single definition that can’t possibly encompass the full cultural impact of a word. If you look at the first question slide of the presentation you’ll see a very broad ranging definition created by a collaborative of people… the definition is rhizomatic, created in time, and the record presented here is a snapshot of it… an archive of a live moment of knowledge.
I’m really excited about this.
Oh my. Loved the dynamic web presentation approach, but not sure I love the picture of me front and center …
BTW, I’m going to plunder this stuff shamelessly (with attribution of course) for my talk next week. Great session. Thanks for the invitation to participate.
Thank you for providing this detail to the process. I saw this method used a LearnTrends 2009 and found my way to your post. There should be a recording of that live presentation sometime soon. See http://learntrends.ning.com/page/learntrends-2009 Thanks.
Dear Dave,
A great session for librarians! It’s a very creative way to use Elluminate platform for a lively discussion on a series of interesting questions from a non-librarian. Your responses/dialogue/jockey skills are wonderful.
…] Best educational use of video / visual – Dave Cormier’s “Presenting With Live Slides” […]
Love this concept! I hosted a similarly open session and turned the result into an article on the topic. Here’s how we did it:
I opened the topic with a few PowerPoint slides, then informed the group that we would create the actual content together, then I would pull it all together into an article to be published. We identified problems and discussed solutions to the biggest ones.
Here’s the resulting article: http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1449/better-elearning-agile-llama-and-lean
Hello Dave,
I am writing you from Turkey. I am one of the few people who are interested in deconstruction. I have a project. I’m looking for an activity. How can I teach English as a foreign language using the rhizomes?
So how can I find creative activities?
Can you help me?
I have read almost all of his articles. You write great things. Keep going like that.