Tryangulation

The Babylonian backup, 1500 B.C.

In Turkey we don't use file drawers very much. Instead we use clear sheet protectors (thousands of them) in big binders like the one you see here. Sometimes I'll include a CD with a backup of the files in the binder. Very useful, and apparently just a recent version of a very old idea.

After the discovery of inscriptions in Luwian Hittite hieroglyphs and Phoenician script at Aslantaş, and tens of thousands of multilingual cuneiform clay tablets at sites like Hattusa and Kültepe, archaeologists went to work to decipher the hieroglyphs. Since they already knew both Phoenecian writing and cuneiform in other languages, they could use them to triangulate (love that word!) the meanings of the Hittite symbols  and work out those thousands of Hittite tablets.

The Hittites borrowed cuneiform writing from neighboring Babylonians, Assyrians and other peoples, and they also borrowed the uses for such a versatile writing system. Invoices, prayers, business contracts, horoscopes, trial outcomes, even textbooks and student worksheets (similar to the one in the banner of this blog), have been found by the thousands. Bureaucracy especially  thrived with this new medium for tracking the minutiae of a world power.

Several world powers later and we're still pushing paper. That is to say, much of what we put on paper the ancients put on clay. One problem: while soft clay is great for writing cuneiform and wiping mistakes clean, once a tablet is dry you have the risk of breakage, or at least a chipped codicil.

Ancient Mesopotamians worked around this by making a clay envelope that completely covered the valuable document. Along the exterior of this still soft envelope a scribe would write a copy of the interior text. If anything happened to the envelope, the inner tablet would stay intact, at least long enough to make another copy.

Next: Where are the boundaries of a paradigm?

Don't be afraid to leave something out

The first rule of listener-friendly PowerPoint use: please don't tell me everything you know.

There's been a lot already on the Web by professional communicators about the use and misuse of PowerPoint (links at the end). The main point is that cluttered slides with lots of images and lots of words inhibit learning.

Now we have a Harvard scientist telling us what we already knew: if you put less in your PowerPoint presentation, your audience will remember more. Stephen M. Kosslyn, psychology professor at Harvard University, explains how to apply cognitive science to your slides, emphasizing visual depictions of information and basic rules of simplicity (read more here).

Before coming to this school, I worked in a public sector agency where we regularly gave briefings to foreign visitors. The briefings were prepared by the public relations team and were designed out of a fear of omission (the darker side of the obsession to impress). Each year the briefing grew longer and more complicated as more projects and other accomplishments demanded inclusion in the presentation.

By the time I left that job, the briefing (we should have called it an elongating) took more than two hours and had hundreds of narcotic slides, many of them full of large numbers, others with nearly a hundred words in miniscule, illegible type. At the end we had aides ready with plenty of Turkish coffee to revive the victims, but it was too late. When the presenter would ask for questions, there was usually just dazed silence, followed by acute memory loss (what did slide #87 say again?).

The fear of omission is cultivated early. When students are required to give a presentation or write a research paper, they feel pressure to demonstrate how much they know about the topic. This feeds the mistaken logic that says that a fact not presented is a fact not known. The purpose of the presentation is focused on the presenter and a motivation to impress or to avoid embarrassment. On the other hand, a well designed presentation focuses on the listener and how she can be enlightened or persuaded. A presentation that is just for the presenter is a waste of everybody's time.

We let students show off their ability to embed animations and create whizbang slide transitions, when we should be teaching them how to communicate. We need to shift the emphasis from displaying information to enabling learning, with an emphasis that is less about what goes on the screen and more about what goes into --and stays in-- the listener's brain.

Here are some more resources for more effective presentations:

Seth Godin: Really bad PowerPoint

Tryangulation: Put your PowerPoint on a diet

a del.icio.us potpourri of links by me

photo by zen

Ban on WordPress enters its 6th month

We're seeing a lot of these screens lately, so you've got a chance to play 'find the differences'. When posting yesterday about the ban on YouTube, I had forgotten to mention the slightly different ban against WordPress that has been in effect here since August 2007.

The ban stems from a libel suit between two Turkish citizens, one of them using WordPress to publish criticisms against the other. A judge decided that since WordPress did not censor the critic and did not observe Turkish court rulings, that WordPress itself should be punished.

I posted about this back in September, but since I use Bloglines instead of visiting the actual sites, I haven't been feeling the effects so acutely -- and stumbled upon a good argument for feed readers as a freedom of speech workaround. Still, this only enables me to read WordPress blogs from outside Turkey; Turkish bloggers cannot access the site to post to their own blogs.

You can find a good summary of the case here:

WordPress Blocked in Turkey | Citizen Media Law Project

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Exploring online communities

I've been invited to contribute to a project to redesign an international online community, and that has got me looking into different kinds of successful communities and how they got that way. Two conferences with an emphasis on community building just wrapped up in the US, and Common Craft posted a nice summary of the lessons learned. The social scientist in me was gratified at reading remarks like "community planning is a farce" (because communities take on a life of their own) and "don't start with the technology" (because you need to set your goals first). Read the rest of Common Craft's post here.

One of the conferences I mentioned was the Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas. A few of the first resources to come out look interesting. One is Mukund Mohan's ten step checklist for starting your community. Among the suggestions are (2) understand why you want to have a community: is it a platform for your ideas, or for members to share among one another? (6) identify your influencers, the first few that will really help you get started. Click here to see the Community 2.0 conference blog that has several more participant contributions and links.

The other conference I referred to was the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. It appears that a lot of the presentations will eventually end up on line, so I'll keep an eye on it. I was particularly interested in a blog post by Kathy Sierra reflecting on the keynote speech she gave at SXSW. On her blog she points out the irony that, even with all the technology that enables us to meet, chat, video conference and share online, we still want to go to conferences and meet up face to face.

Communication technology can make it easier to move large amounts of information around, but it's still not the best way to help people connect emotionally, to inspire, and to create a feeling of belonging together. After reading the links about building online communities, I suggest you read Kathy's post here which includes a list of suggestions for building some face-to-face time into your online community.

To put this in the context of education and learning, I'd say there's definitely a place for classroom blogs, podcasts, video conferences, and anything else that will broaden the opportunities for students to interact with others far beyond the school walls, but there's no replacement for an inspiring, challenging teacher at your side.

TED Talks: recharge your mind

TED -- which in this case stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design" -- is a yearly gathering of inventors, activists, intellectuals and other big time thinkers.  The conference is an exclusive event that until now conference attendees have kept all that great talking and thinking to themselves. But now, the 2006 conference has posted several of its best talks for free on the web.

So far I've watched dynamic talks on energy, creativity, environmental justice, and the power of decisions, and I can endorse them as a sure cure for summer brain atrophy. Each of the talks is only 18 minutes, but by the end you'll wish each one was longer.

Click here to start recharging.

Learning theory for the rest of us

The Creating Passionate Users blog has a great article by Kathy Sierra titled Crash course in learning theory. It's a little long, but reads fast because it's so well written and entertaining.  The article is actually as much a guide to learning praxis as it is to learning theory. In fact, I'm filing this under the Communication category as well as Learning because there's so much practical advice that's useful for meeting presentations and classroom instruction too.

Put your PowerPoint on a diet

Are your presentations getting longer, more wordy, without getting more effective? Here are some resources to slim down your presentations without losing your message.

Beyond Bullets, a blog by Cliff Atkinson. The blog title makes the point that (pardon the pun!) that you can have great presentations without ever using a bullet. Cliff's latest blog post is titled Keeping your media human.

Presenters University. Click on Courses and follow the topics to find useful articles on designing slides, handouts and energizing your delivery. They also have a lot of cool templates you can download for free.

Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds' blog. Check out the "Popular posts" list on the right side of the screen to find short essays like The Sound of One Room Napping.