{"id":586,"date":"2009-04-10T01:10:25","date_gmt":"2009-04-10T06:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/itp.indiamos.com\/blog\/?p=586"},"modified":"2009-04-14T01:09:34","modified_gmt":"2009-04-14T06:09:34","slug":"pictures-vs-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itp.indiamos.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/10\/pictures-vs-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Pictures vs. words"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Remember how on March 5th I was supposed to give a presentation in 1′, 2′, 10′<\/a>, but it got bumped? And then the following week’s class was canceled, and then we had spring break. So it wasn’t until three weeks later, March 26, that I finally got to take my turn squirming at the front of the room. Three extra weeks! So, naturally, I used all that time working on my project, right?<\/p>\n

Oh, no, that wouldn’t have been fair. I did revise my slides, but I left it until the last fucking minute, as usual, so as not to have an undue advantage over my classmates. Right. That’s totally why.<\/p>\n

What I did do in the interim, however, was stumble across this fab webcast by Nancy Duarte<\/a> about how to give better presentations:<\/p>\n

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After hearing her talk, I bought and started reading her book, Slide:ology<\/a><\/cite>, which is a more detailed presentation of the same suggestions.<\/p>\n

(Here’s another Nancy Duarte webcast, which I haven’t watched yet: Creating Powerful Presentations<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

So between that and taking copious notes on my classmates’ midterm presentations, especially in Wearables, I got a lot of ideas about how I should redo my slides, as well as my overall presentation style. The result is a deck that does not make any sense unless I’m standing there with a remote, explaining it to you<\/a> (PDF, 1.1 MB)—and using a remote is, I decided after watching a lot of in-class presentations, a good thing to do. I got my Mac remote to turn pages in Acrobat using a program called iRed Lite<\/a>. I can’t really recommend it, since it stumped me for quite a while the first time I used it, and the next time I tried, a few weeks later, I positively could not figure out how I had ever made it work in the first place. There’s something about the UI that confuses the hell out of me. But it can, theoretically, do the job, and it’s free.<\/p>\n

Some other things I learned from watching classmates’ presentations:<\/p>\n