Choose your own presentation

Good friend and fantastic presenter, Gary Hartzell, sent me this reference a few weeks ago:

 Lane, Robert (2006).  A Guide to Relational Presentations.  Aspire Communications.  http://www.aspirecommunications.com/   Accessed September 20, 2006.

 (Can you tell by the citation format Dr. Hartzell's been a college professor

Anyway, the concepts in Lane's 16 page booklet are very interesting and hearken back to the days of HyperCard and HyperStudio - multimedia that is structured on something other than the linear organization that PowerPoint begs us to use.

The authors encourage a more free-flowing type of presentation software use with hypertext links (within PowerPoint) that allow those who attend a presentation to help determine its path. And I think I've found a way to test this out.

I'm doing a new presentation today for the Georgia Council of Media Organizations in beautiful Athens called Libraries for the Net Generation. And in preparing it, I found there is simply TOO much information on the topic to fit the standard 50 minute time slot.

So what I've done is create what I call a "Choose Your Own Presentation" format. One slide, below, will link to 5 different areas of Net Gen attributes and the group attending will choose the areas we explore first.

For an old linear thinker/presenter, this goes against the grain, but we'll see what happens.

By the way, there are some tremendous resources on our current crop of learners. Among the things I've been reading in preparation are: 

• Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-19 Year-olds. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005 www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm
• Howe and Strauss, Millenials Rising. Vintage, 2000
• Oblinger and Oblinger, Educating the Net Generation, EDUCAUSE, 2005 www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen
• Pew Internet & American Life Project (various reports) www.pewinternet.org/
• Tech-savvy students stuck in text-dominated schools, education evolving, 2005 www.educationevolving.org/studentvoices/student_opinion_papers.asp

 The Olinger and Olinger work is a great place to start.

The handouts for my presentation with synthesize some of this work and attempt to relate it to school libraries can be found here. How do we as educators respond when kids are radically different in so many ways from us? Or do we try to make them change to fit our systems? I think we will be in a world of hurt even thinking that's possible.

Hope this old dog is up to some new tricks today.