I had never heard of SlideShare before and I enjoyed having a browse through some of the library related (and not so library related) slide shows. I have a few issues with it though. The first is that I have always been told that PowerPoint presentations should be used as a visual aid but should not be the main focus of your presentation. So many of the presentations I looked at were pretty worthless without a running commentary and, although you can add audio to the presentation, on my PC (and many others in the UL) I have no sound card or speakers. The second issue is that like everything else on the internet, 95% of the content is actually pretty rubbish. So there may well be a few good ideas you can pinch but you may also have to wade through pages and pages of complete tripe!
I also find it very difficult to present using slides I haven't written - everyone has their own style and it usually doesn't blend in with mine. I think if I were to use SlideShare it would be to share my own presentation rather than use someone elses. For shared presentations we tend to just save it to a place where everyone can find it anyway. I do really like the idea of SlideShare though so I will keep looking.
By the way, Prince says that the Internet is dead......any thoughts?
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Max Atkinson's take http://bit.ly/asRJaH on PowerPoint, as I understand it, anyway, is that this tool is best used when talking about the image itself. To that extent, PowerPoint is in fact the centre of attention.
ReplyDeleteI once saw a speaker show us a series of ppt bullet points, & appear to be surprised by each new slide as it came up. I think he must have been using the presentation for the 2nd time, having forgotten what he'd said to the slides first time round. Squirmaceous.
Thanks for the link - it's an interesting blog but I didn't feel that Atkinson was suggesting that PowerPoint should be the centre of attention. He even suggests turning it off at times to draw the audience's attention back to the speaker. It seems to me that he wants to promote clever use of PowerPoint with visuals such as pictures and graphs which can be used by the speaker to engage the audience but which on their own are not the sole focus of the presentation. I would have thought that this would serve two purposes. Firstly to ensure that the speaker can't just wing it by reading out slides (so boring for the audience to watch) and secondly to ensure that the audience has to engage with the speaker rather than just switching off and reading the slides as and when they come up. Both excellent points and there are presentations on SlideShare that demonstrate this well but without access to sound the tool is pretty pointless.
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