A great blog post by Seth Godin on why university text books are a waste of time & money and are inherently out of date. There is a natural role for presentations here.
Is there anything better that a university lecturer can use to transfer an idea in an hour or 2? Putting it up on Slideshare for free afterwards gives the most return to the government education budget. A creative common license makes it easy for lecturers to borrow the best slides from each other. Over time constantly updated “crowd-sourced” education decks will emerge that beat any text book easily. Better teaching material, no cost.
Related: a post on the Duarte blog on how presentations could mark the end of the boring press release.
2 comments
Indeed great post by Seth Godin. I totally agree with ditching traditional textbooks. Although I am not so sure about presentations per se as a replacement tool, but I present only my experience here. I am writing MA about presentations used during classes in my Dept. (Uni of Wroclaw, Poland). Inspired by the way most of professors use ppt as a teleprompter(sic!), reading slides, showing them without a reason while saying about 15% of what's on them and many more. So all the sins while using ppt. Designing a good & to the point presentation needs time, factor professors I am observing declare not to have. But if they are able to prepare a good presentation (I skip the delivery part here)I agree Slideshare is the best place they should put it up. Although Nancy Duarte suggests some additional elements to take into account when preparing something for Slideshare or internet in general.
Krzys Baszton
I meant Slideshare as a post-presentation tool to which students can refer back, and which enables tax payers to access the content as well (without the benefit of live explanations by the professor). The most important benefit of Slideshare though is academics/teachers sharing content with each other.