Unleash Your Inner Spielberg When Presenting
Posted 28 October 2011
I’ve had the privilege of speaking at technical and educational conferences for more than a decade. At the turn of the century (it really wasn’t that long ago), I was speaking on using streaming media in higher education, and even did a session on the first release of the Flash Media Server at conferences like Syllabus (back before it became the Campus Technology conference).
There was, alas, a long, dry spell for me in speaking at conferences for the past five years. That dry spell recently came to an end, in a big way.
In the last year, I’ve spoken at Adobe’s Education Summit at MAX, CUE 2011, and Educomm 2011. I also recently spoke as part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology’s speaker series, giving a variation on the same talk that I gave at some of the other conferences: “Unleash Your Inner Spielberg When Presenting (Online) Lectures.”
There are a lot of ways to present information in PowerPoint-style presentations. Most of them don’t facilitate information dissemination and cognitive flow. My presentation focuses on using techniques from both film and the stage to help make presentations more engaging and increase learner information retention. \r\n\r\nI’m pretty happy with how the presentation has turned out over its various iterations. It’s been great for me to get back into the hard work of presenting, refining a presentation, and tuning it for the appropriate current audience.
A recording of the latest iteration of this presentation can be found on the Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology’s web events site.