Multimedia Presentations and the Curse of “Slideuments”

As 11th Grade English A1 classes develop their presentations on In the Lake of the Woods, I wanted to provide some resources and examples of effective presentation techniques, with the hopes that students (and possibly teachers) will continue to experiment with creative ways of presenting their ideas electronically.  By far the most useful site that you should visit is Garr Reynold’s blog Presentation Zen. His site develops his own ideas, compiles ideas from all over the internet about what strong presentations entail, and at times offers some examples of ineffective ones.  He also has posts on relevant topics such as “Where can you find good images?” and compares unique presentation styles, like he does with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in his post titled “Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic.”

One example of someone who has created a wholly stylistically unique approach to multimedia presentation is Lawrence Lessig.  Garr Reynolds writes

Many people like Lessig’s unique presentation style which blends a sort of professorial narrative in sync with quickly changing images and short bursts of text. But many are surprised that I can admire Lessig’s style. But I look at my job as pointing you to successful people who present in many different ways. I never say that you should do it the way I do, or Steve Jobs does, or Larry Lessig does, or Al Gore, does, and on and on. No one approach or method is perfect, but we can learn by observing the new and the different as well as the traditional.

Designer Jason Santa-Maria also just published an interesting post on design and presentation titled “Make Yourself Presentable.” Below is an excerpt from the post on what works for him:

I have two basic rules for slide design: simple and big. Type should always be big enough to read from the back of the room, and simplicity is best to convey information quickly. For instance, when I use imagery, I only use images that take up the full slide. And usually without any text. Just a simple big picture and then I fill in the rest of the story during the talk. I generally lean towards having lots of slides because I like having lots of examples or alternate ways of presenting information.