…and I'm all out of bubble gum.
Posts tagged Merlin Mann
Free-style Online Learning
May 13th
One of my responsibilities at Jewish Day School is to write a weekly “tech tips” column for the online faculty news. This is one such tip.
Even as the end-of-year to-do lists are approaching critical overload, I find that one of the joys of the spring is the contemplation of what I will be working on next year. Not so much in a “next year I’ll do this all differently” kind of snit, but with more of a “year in review” focus: spring and graduation makes me sentimental and reminiscent.
With that in mind, in the past week I have come across two interesting resources both for teaching in general and for thinking about our work as “knowledge workers” in the 21st century (to infinity and beyond!). First, Merlin Mann discusses how we do (or do not) allocate our time and attention to getting our projects done. Thoughtful, provocative and entertaining stuff. Second, Williams College’s Project for Effective Teaching has gone online with a truly exciting, provocative array of professorial reflections and questions around specific aspects of classrooms and teaching and learning. Enjoy!
How, you might ask, do videos like these fall into my hands? I follow-up on the sources of interesting articles that I see. And then on the sources of those sources: I like to find where the ideas are swimming around raw and unfettered. I do this by following a boat-load of interesting “edu-bloggers”, by following (and engaging with) other teachers on Twitter, and by doing a lot of skimming.
PowerPoint makes us D-U-M-Dumb
May 6th
One of my responsibilities at Jewish Day School is to write a weekly “tech tips” column for the online faculty news. This is one such tip.
As we head down the homestretch of May and June, more and more students (and teachers) are experiencing siyyum for their coursework, either as final papers or presentations or projects. Projects and papers are delightfully straight-forward and easy to facilitate and grade… at least, when compared to presentations, which have the added benefit of being a potential exercise in goodwill and patience to sit through.
The first hurdle our students have to get over is the technology itself — bringing together all the disparate elements of their presentation into one place and time. A few years ago, I wrote up a cheat sheet of tips that help to avoid the most common student pitfalls. I have not run into technical problems with student PowerPoints since I started giving them this handout (I kid you not).
In general, a good presentation has to nail not just the content and technology, but also visuals and public speaking. And this is the hardest thing to do right. For adults, even. Experts have started to decry PowerPoint as not just problematic, but actively destructive when it comes to communicating information and especially nuance clearly.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
Shifting the focus from a PowerPoint document to the holistic presentation will further the student’s ability to communicate complex ideas — a key skill in today’s (or any day’s) world. Some further reading that is both informative and motivational on that front:
- Merlin Mann talks about “How [he] made his presentations a little better” (know this: he was pretty good to begin with)
- Business Week breaks down how to “Deliver a presentation like Steve Jobs” (the inimitable CEO of Apple)
- Edward Tufte (the master of information presentation — and notorious PowerPoint-hater) examines how to get the absolute most out of PowerPoint (or not)
Who are you now?
Feb 4th
A couple days ago, iTunes roused itself out of its torpor and suddenly downloaded a podcast episode from Merlin Mann at 43 Folders, that he posted several months ago. Maybe iTunes knows more about my head than I do, because Merlin caught me right where I am right now, thinking about how we learn and how we do…
Take a minute (well, more like 45 minutes) and at least listen to the podcast, if you don’t actually watch the video. It’s worth it. It’s thought-provoking. And it addresses some real issues in professional development and in teaching and learning.
Merlin’s core idea, throughout, is that the situation of the knowledge worker is to be constantly figuring out not just how to do their job, but what role they’re taking on to do that job — “who am I today?” And he takes on the idea that we’re all advanced beginners, suggesting that, in fact, expertise is real and attainable and hard to quantify. And that the difference between an expert and a master is the ability to articulate your expertise to learners.
There are so many ways that this is both scary and inspirational from a teaching and learning perspective, both in the classroom and working with my colleagues on professional development. So many, in fact, that I’m going to need to come back to this in a few days to really unpack what I’m thinking.
But go watch the video.
