Reinier, Cristiano and Melinda had visited Barcamp London a couple of weeks ago and Reinier gave a talk on Voluntary Economies which I helped him prepare.

Consuming Experience has kindly recorded this and a lot of other talks from Barcamp.

This is a rich topic and there is a lot to say about it. As I watch Reinier presenting it on the video, I see him explaining the examples we came up with and ideas pop up in my head of other examples, of how he could have told it better or how I would have told it differently.

Watching a video of a presentation you gave or helped prepare is immensely educational. I of course already ‘knew’ this, but usually it rewatching yourself present isn’t practiced very vigorously. This convinced me that it is completely worth it, probably time and time again.

As anyone was supposed to, I gave a quick presentation during Barcamp Berlin. I decided to give a quick how-to about using Yahoo Pipes to make a lifestream like this. In the end I think it would have been more interesting to just have talked about Yahoo Pipes in general as the most people didn’t get what and how Yahoo Pipes works. An hour was way to long for my standard talk anyway so the ability to show people how Pipes works was a real joy. Below are the slides I used, and I will put on a post explaining my presentation in a bit more words soon.  

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Most of you must have already heard from Pecha Kucha. For the ones who haven’t, Garr Reynolds explains it in detail on his blog. But in short:

On a Pecha Kucha evening, people who have something to share with others can tell their story to the audience with only one constraint: Each of the 20 slides they have to use is shown for only 20 seconds.

The Pecha Kucha (which means chit-chat) originated in Japan, and quickly spread around the globe. Berlin was one of the first cities to follow, so I had to check it out locally.

What I experienced earlier in Rotterdam and the Hague, was that the evening completely depends on the quality of the speakers. It can be shit, or a hit. The same case in Berlin:

Shiro Masuyama

Shiro MASUYAMA from Japan hardly spoke English nor German. Although the slides showed interesting art installations, it was impossible to understand a word, so I could have just watched them on the internet. Twenty seconds suddenly seemed like a awful long time for a slide.

However, there were two speakers who actually saved the evening with their projects:

Tobi’s Timemachine:

Tobi has developed a Firefox Plug-in that restyles any web page to the 90’s, completely with animated gif’s and midi-music. Completely useless, but we, the audience, loved it. FourStarters would look like this. You can download his timemachine or watch some more examples on flickr.

Alex von Furstenberg:

David Henry Brown Jr is an Artist based in NYC. For one of his projects he used to dress up as a German royalty called Alex von Furstenberg. He would bluf his way into VIP parties this way, and meet up with famous Celebrities to gain his 15 minutes of fame.

His talk really gave extra value to his photos, giving extra information behind every shot. The reason for example, that he had a red nose on some of the pictures, was that he had to wait in the cold before he finally found a way to penetrate into the party ground.

Of course I visited the party afterwards (which wasn’t VIP) to collect a picture with Alex von Furstenberg for my personal 15 minutes of fame.

Round Up:

First of all, the Evening could have used a bit more spice to my taste. Why not ‘boo’ at someone who doesn’t captivate your attention, and ‘cheer’ at someone who does? It may sound harsh, but they are grown-ups who choose to get up that stage. At least it motivates them more to improve, than their friends saying “Great Talk!”.

Secondly, some of the Speakers have no clue about their audience. The event is mainly visited by designers, architects, artists, filmmakers and musicians. So there is no point in asking “Who of you owns a Football Club to sponsor me?” Pecha Kucha is a great place to promote your projects, but don’t expect any miracles if the audience has the same interests as yourself.

Did I learn anything? No. Did I get inspired? Yes.

Will I participate in the future? Yes.

About what? To be continued…

We got a small notebook on Reboot to jot down our thoughts. I made extensive notes during the first half of the first day and during lunch I then managed to lose this book. I’m writing this from memory which should still be very accurate, but might not completely capture my thoughts of the moment.

Jeremy Keith did a presentation early on the first day about Soul online which was a great combination of right and left brain. His talk about soul and provenance was a nice story with a microformat sneaked in here and there. His idea, that who you are online is defined by your presence, ties into current projects which create and combine presence streams.

Transparency

This does raise issues about privacy, authority and reputation. A quote by Gibson says that we cannot escape the power of transparency: “It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.”

People are multifaceted and are becoming more and more transparent. So this way you would be able to see a complete picture of someone and you would have increasing difficulty hiding parts of yourself from people. A big objection to be raised by this, is that by tieing together the story we tell ourselves, we lose control about the story we tell others.

One idea we had to solve this is to create a service which will disinform webservices for you. So suppose you give it your Flickr login, it will create ten more Flickr users under your name with semi-random information and pictures associated to you. This way a casual Googler will have a very difficult time to form an accurate and reliable picture of you. Increasing crap might be our best way to privacy.

Provenance

The concept of provenance —I think a very difficult word for non-native English speakers— is a nice way to check the reliability of people online and to form yourself an image of someone you ‘meet’ online. This is nice but people change their minds, ideas progress and evolve over time. Someone who held one political or religious view in the past, may have changed that.

This is not a big problem, it is in fact very human, but currently people in general do not respect that. Most people are more inclined to trust someone who looks like he is sure of what he is saying and has said the same thing for all his life. People who are not confident or who flip-flop are less trusted.

I hope the future with its unimaginable tools of transparency makes people adjust.

A while back I was at BarCampLondon2 where I held my talk about Education 2.0. During this talk and the rest of the day I got to talk with people that were either involved or interested in education. I had a small idea with some people to setup EduCamp in London. Unfortunately there is already an Educamp planned in June in Dublin so this plan was quickly canceled.

One idea that I did want to pursue was the idea of doing some freelance podcasting for education. I already did some screencasts in the time that Reinier and I were still working for Education Made Easy so it wasn’t that much of a big step. After a couple of weeks thinking it through and setting stuff up I present you: teachr.tv.

I wanted to provide some content before I started spreading the word, so when you go to teachr.tv now you will see that there are already 3 episodes available. There are a few plans for the next episodes but I am very open to ideas and suggestions. You can mail me at info@teachr.tv or send me interesting stuff to del.icio.us/teachrtv.

I noticed that making high quality screencasts is still a lot of work but the workflow on a Mac is definitely more efficient than it ever was on Windows. As if I wasn’t happy enough with that, teachr.tv was recently even reviewed in the EdTechTalk-podcast (thank you Jeff!).

I’ve been watching at least one TED talk every day for the past week, and in general they are very impressive. Most talks from 2005 and 2006 can be found At the TED talks page.

While many of the talks are excellent, one stood out to me as something to watch to improve your own presenting skills. Let me highlight what I mean for a moment: There are certain ‘defining’ presentations that show off a particular presenting style, and these are very well known. For example:

• Lawrence Lessig - Free Culture
• Dick Hardt - Identity 2.0
• Steve Jobs - Keynote Macworld 2006
• Michael Wesch - The machine is us/ing us

In case you don’t recognize some or all of the above, I recommend you watch them. Entertaining and usually not that long (Except Jobs, that lasts more than an hour) - but most importantly they highlight a particular presentation style. You learn something new that you can apply to your own presentations.

There are more presentations out there that are equally good, but those four were the most iconic, and/or the first (famous/accessible) one, and thus they have become somewhat of a legend amongst presenters.

Dean Kamen’s talk on the segway and his ideals behind its development (Feb 2002) should probably also be in that list. He uses no slides and only one prop, manages to come over as unhurried and casual (unlike just about every other TED presentation) yet he speaks relatively quickly anyway (interesting example of Alper’s previous post’s comments on presentation pacing), seems to be speaking in a stream of consciousness manner, as if he’s just talking to you without having prepared anything, and yet everytime a relevant statistic can be quoted, he quotes them.

As far as presenting naked goes, I nominate this talk as the iconic example.

Some things to watch:

He gets out loud laughter from the audience a couple of times but he never uses a punchline. He just trails off an anecdote and lets the audience ‘get it’ on their own time. This both strengthens the effect of the joke and offers a convenient ‘out’ if the audience doesn’t like the joke. With a punchline, if the audience doesn’t respond, you look like an idiot, and you’ll need a lot of cohones to continue your speech unfazed by the bombing the joke. Imagine for a moment if Dean’s jokes didn’t elicit any laughs. It wouldn’t have been very awkward. ‘hard jokes’ shouldn’t be in presentations unless you know what you are doing, but you can’t really overdo the ’soft joke’ - lacking a punchline or a dedicated ‘insert laughter here’ moment.

He engages the entire audience very well. It helps that he can just ride around the podium, but without slides, moving around is not very distracting and can even help keep the focus on you. So, if you’ve settled in for a bit of storytelling and turned off the projector, start pacing!

Where you make an unlikely claim, back it up with a number. You don’t need to delve into quoting sources, (but expect questions and have a file ready to quote sources when challenged) and you certainly don’t need to highlight it on a slide, but it does convey a sense of professionalism, a sense that you know what you’re doing.

Remember that this speech was given 2002, before the Segway’s less than stellar impact on humanity has become apparent.

I graduated from university recently and having spent some seven odd years at that venerable institution, I have collected some baggage which I need to express but which I also feel would help educators to improve themselves.

I think the word is catharsis.

Due to an administrative mixup and some human errors (both not completely my fault), I still have to follow one course: in4012tu Speech and Language Processing. This isn’t too much of a pain because languages are completely my thing and it gives me an excuses to pretend that I am a student for two more months.

One risk is that I stand the chance of being the gunner in this class. It is really easy to ignore the mantra: Learn, not teach.

Recording

One idea that I have concerns recording lectures. Our lectures have to be given in English if somebody in the hall requests it. This is very much to the chagrin of most our lecturers. Teachers at DUT have to lecture Masters courses in English but most of them hardly relish this opportunity to improve their language skills.

One of the overlooked advantages of lecturing in English is that it greatly increases your reach, not only to those one or two international students in the lecture hall, but to the entire world.

Seeing as all major conferences are already being recorded to be publicized after the fact, wouldn’t it be completely trivial for an university to do the same with lectures? And even if it wasn’t provided by university, I think anybody with a Macbook could easily tape themselves with the builtin iSight. Last weekend I did an impromptu video shoot and had it uploaded to YouTube within minutes.

The quality of the material, though not optimal, would be wholly acceptable for anybody interested in learning the stuff. With some extra effort the lecturer could also sync his slides to the video stream in a custom application (Slideshare + YouTube mashup anybody?) to provide a better viewing experience.

I can think of a great number of advantages but here’s one to start you off:
Giving a lecture is an important and time consuming activity and as such also should be worth recording for future reference. The value of creating a personal video archive of yourself telling interesting stuff should be directly evident to everybody. Publishing that video on a personal blog would further increase your value as a teacher/scholar. You could show the world that you are a valuable and interesting person and build a global following.
Just think what this would do for your next job interview or your chances of getting tenure.

Why would you not do this? One real reason could be the university’s intellectual property stance. Is a lecturer allowed to record his own lecture and do cool stuff with it? I have no clue but it seems worth a try.

Hyperspeed

Second point is the speed at which most lectures are given. This is not completely to my taste. I hope this isn’t representative of the speed at which university students absorb information because if so, then the innovation position of the Netherlands is in deep shit indeed.

Hyperspeed is a feature. After my graduation talk some people told me that not only had I started off too fast but that I also was accelerating during the course of my presentation. This was in part because I was nervous but mostly just because I had a lot to say and a limited amount of time in which to say it.

There are excellent speakers who have also learned to pace themselves very well and use rhythm and silence for maximum effect and information conveyance (see some at TED). This can work for expert communicators but in most cases going too slow is definitely a bug and runs the risk of putting me and the rest of your audience to sleep.

There are also speakers who go really fast and don’t effect less because of it. One of the best lectures I attended at university was given by Charl Botha and in my memory it stands out like a visual TGV ride.

I definitely think I can improve on my presenting and pacing but speed per se will probably not be one of the first things to be improved. Next time you see me present, just “Prepare for ludicrous speed”.

A suggested improvement to speedup lectures: have everybody watch all the slides in advance and make mental notes about stuff that isn’t clear. Have the lecturer go through the slides at high speed only stopping for questions. Use the rest of the time to do non-sleep inducing stuff.