Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Content Matters 

Powerpoint presentations on moments in the history of computing from the seventh graders today -- they were ready yesterday, but I made them spend the time reading each other's presentations and self-constructing a group order, in the hopes that they'd extrapolate from this a better sense of segue and sequence both macro and micro. Ten presentations in an hour will be tight, but if it flows, we'll hit a thousand years of history from abacus to Y2k in no time.

They better be good, anyway. Three weeks in the making, after all -- this generation knows how to use the software, but getting them to do good design takes much UNlearning as careful construction. Here's hoping at least some of them manage to get close to the ideal of simple, elegant, subject-and-substance-driven style, though even I can't aspire to this level of presentational perfection.

Speaking of content, Shaw asks a legitimate follow-up question to yesterday's musiclust post. Implied: if music matters, then which music is no trivial matter.

In this case, however, I prefer the 3k songshuffle. So, this morning's first ten, with a caveat that I've been dropping data onto the iPod in no particular order, and thus some of my favorite tuneage isn't on it yet:

1. Grateful Dead -- Franklin's Tower
2. Sam Phillips -- Holding On To The Earth
3. Mark Erelli -- Hollow Man
4. Wilco -- Radio Cure
5. Colin Hay -- I Just Don't Think I'll Ever Get Over You
6. David Gray -- Long Distance Call
7. Michael Franti -- Love'll Set Me Free
8. Daniel Lanois -- Shine
9. Jeffrey Foucault -- Mayfly
10. Keller Williams -- Roshambo

As good a sense of environment as any, I guess. Oddly, 9 out of ten male artists, despite the predominance of chromosomal otherwise on the small white 'pod.

In other culled-from-comments news, blogspamming continues at the rate of fifty a day. I am especially proud of this totally piss-into-the-wind response. Well, it made me feel better.

posted by boyhowdy | 8:15 AM |

---

Comments:

That's an awesome presentation.

Apple ran a contest a while back for Keynote presentations. I have downloaded some and shown them to my classes before we do a presentation. Some of them weren't so great (in fact, one had an error). But it was nice having examples I didn't make.

Maybe we will do a "Who are you?" presentation with images they find online.

How many slides did you kids have to do?

# posted by  Lady Strathconn : 3:13 PM, October 18, 2005

 

It is neat, isn't it? And, best of all: not one bullet.

My own kids did roughly 5-7 slides, though a "the end" slide did NOT count as anything useful. In this case, though I made it clear to kids that the number of slides was (and always is) not the issue -- it was the TIMING that mattered (3-5 minutes). In the real world, presentationsd are developed based on time, so why teach them to aim for page-length equivalent? Anyway, different topics cover diff amounts of slides to get to the same timing (some topics are more visual than others...)

Link to the apple examples, if they're still up, would be greatly appreciated.

# posted by  boyhowdy : 7:17 PM, October 18, 2005

 

And now you know why your Ipod gets stolen....you need UNCOOL music (and not cool cool music).

Two words: Leo Sayer

Two More words: Air Supply

and one word: Bread

Don't think different man,

think cheese.

It'll save ya a Ipod

# posted by  Shaw Israel Izikson : 11:07 PM, October 18, 2005

 

Post a Comment