Presenting, presenting, presenting – Weeknote #32 – 18th October 2019
Author: James Clay
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Monday I was undertaking the final preparations for some presentation training I am delivering on Thursday. This included printing some postcards as well as designing activities.
I took advantage of Pixabay to find images for my postcards, this is a great site for images, and due to their open licensing, you can use them in a variety of ways. Though I often attribute the site for the images I use, it’s not a requirement, so if you use them later or forget, it’s not really an issue.
Tuesday I was off to London for a meeting to discuss some future collaborative work that Jisc may undertake. What are the big challenges that HE (and FE) are facing for the future. One comment which was made I thought was interesting, was how challenging it was to get people to think about long term future challenges. Most people can identify current issues and potential near-future challenges but identifying the really big challenges that will impact education in the medium or long term, is really hard. Part of the challenge is that there are so many factors that can impact and predicting the future is thus very hard.
Reminded of this challenge of predicting the future, this week with the imminent anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall thirty years ago. Watching the haunting nuclear war TV film, Threads in 1984, I had no idea that the Cold War was every going to end, it looked like it would last forever and we would always be living under the threat of nuclear war. Five years later on the 9thNovember 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. I remember watching it on the news in my student accommodation, thinking, what’s happening, how is this happening? Back then we didn’t have social media, mobile phones or the web, so the only way for news to filter through was by television and newspapers. A year later we had the reunification of Germany. A year after that the USSR was dissolved.
I have often spoken at events about the future of learning and only a couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post about the predictions I was making ten years ago at the FOTE 2009 event.
So what of my predictions?
Well we know predicting the future is hard and generally most people get it wrong.
You will no doubt not be surprised that I got a lot of things wrong…
One thing I feel I did get right was that mobile was going to be big
I think predicting those challenges is hard, but deciding not to prepare for them is not a good course of action. One of the things you need to also consider after predicting the future and start to work on stuff, is when to stop doing that stuff. Has the concept or idea reached somewhere, has it stopped being useful, has it been superseded? Sometimes you stop, sometimes you park and sometimes you keep going.
One future technology that a lot of pundits have been talking about has been virtual reality. So it was interesting to read this news item in which the BBC reported this week that they were stopping VR development.
The BBC has disbanded the team it created to make virtual reality (VR) content, saying its funding has ended.
They were not the only people to do this, in the same article it was reported that Google was reducing its involvement in VR.
It comes as Google halts sales of its Daydream View headsets, admitting it does not see a future for smartphone-based VR.
What does this mean?
Well we might want to consider the fact that virtual reality as it is, is really not going to be as disruptive and game changing as predicted. Maybe there is no future for VR in entertainment and information, but that doesn’t mean necessarily there isn’t a future for VR in education.
Back in 2013 on my Tech Blog I talked about the death of 3D.
So if 3D is defunct, can’t bring myself to say dead, what is the next big thing in video? Well according to the pundits who attended CES it is 4K or ultra HD as some marketing people are calling it.
Here we are six years later and in all the big stores I have been into recently, 4K is everywhere, I don’t see 3D any more.
I was always surprised that 3D video didn’t gain the same traction that VR has in educational development circles. Having said that they are very similar in concept, maybe we should learn from the lessons of 3D.
I seem to have gained a bit of a reputation in the edtech world as, well as I was once described as the “Grim Reaper of Education” and “it’s not dead until James Clay says it’s dead”.
So I did read my colleague, Duncan Peberdy’s article on WonkHE, Is the lecture dead? with a little raised eyebrow.
Once ubiquitous, the lecture-based model of disseminating information and instruction is evolving rapidly. But we may still be too early in these evolutions and the research projects into their outcomes, to fully write off the lecture, although many – including vice chancellors – are already advocating this.
Of course we have been here before back, ten years ago, when Donald Clark at ALT-C 2009 said the lecture was finished….
So who remembers this on this day from nine years ago.#altc2010 #altc Were you in the audience? pic.twitter.com/tYCfTfqBjr
— James Clay (@jamesclay) September 7, 2019
My reflections back then were written up in this blog post.
Of course at that same conference we had the infamous VLE is Dead debate…
Wednesday was the HE Conference, a last minute change meant that I was asked to chairthe morning session. This was something I hadn’t done before,
In the afternoon I delivered my session. I had fifteen minutes to cover a range of subject matter.
My presentation was entitled Boosting Student Retention and Achieving Strategic Goals Through Data and Analytics.
There were three areas I covered in my talk were:
- Tackling the student mental health challenge by utilising data to enhance student support mechanisms
- Transforming learning experience and helping students learn more through personalisation and analytics
- Utilising practical mechanisms for engaging with staff and students in order to make smarter procurements in tech
I finished off my presentation with some of the wider consideration universities needed to think about in relation to the use of data and analytics.
I got some nice feedback and here are the slides I used.
Of course the challenge I have, is that people who attended would have heard my presentation, but the slides are just images (thank you Pixabay) and no text!
On Thursday I was off to our Harwell office where I was delivering an all day session to the apprentices in Jisc on presentation skills.
Part of the session was based on my infamous “duck goes quack presentation I once gave at another staff development session.
These two blog posts were very influential on my presentation style
I also reviewed these links prior to running the session.
- Delivering an effective presentation — University of Leicester
- Top Tips for Effective Presentations
- Tips for effective presentation – University of Birmingham
- How to Give a Killer Presentation
I use the following sites for images.
I am always a little surprised by what images of mine are popular, and which that get ignored, that I post to Instagram This week this image proved to be quite popular compared to other photos I post to the service.
Having been out a lot of the week, Friday was about catching up and clearing out the inbox. I had a few online meetings as well.
My top tweet this week was this one.
Could your data end up in the dock? | Wonkhe https://t.co/Pms0aksp5F
— James Clay (@jamesclay) October 14, 2019
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