Rocket Science

More as a public service than anything else, here’s a link to the presentation I gave recently on the SpokenMedia project. (I say public service since I don’t like watching video of myself )

Here’s the presentation I gave at OpenEd 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

In the uStream video below, my presentation starts at about 19:30 in. The first part of the presentation is Mara Hancock from UC Berkeley talking about Opencast Matterhorn. (Unfortunately they forgot to start saving the stream at the start of her talk.)

I’m halfway through my marathon two-week, around the world trip. I’m not dead yet, but I think I flew over it sometime on Saturday/Sunday.

I gave three presentations (2009 Technology for Education Workshop, Microsoft Research India and IEEE Computer Society Bangalore Section) while in India, basically the same one–but in three different durations. First was 20 minutes, then 5 minutes and then an hour. Needless to say by the third one, I had things down pat.

My presentation to the IEEE-CS Bangalore Section was also the best presentation of the three–I was able to spend the time to present the material, and got great questions from the audience. I’m really annoyed at myself that I didn’t record the presentation, it would have made a great slidecast.

I’m embedding the first presentation, the one with a slidecast, below.

But two users of Slideshare.net have marked our presentation on Educational Innovation & Technology at MIT as a “favorite”.

To be fair, we did not cover anywhere near the breadth or depth of things going on at MIT. Nonetheless it’s interesting folks found the presentation interesting.

This starts to hint at the power of openness, sharing and distributed content for OEIT.

Ok, so I’m using this post to describe the process I went through to use a recent presentation as an example of how OEIT could highlight a recent presentation on its website. And I’ll use it as a means of demonstrating the type of writing that I think the OEIT website needs to have.

If I was just writing about this topic for my blog, I would probably start off with something like…

Original for a “blog post”:

Jeff Merriman and I presented to 120 K-12 teachers, administrators and instructional technologists on MIT OpenCourseWare and Highlights for High School, Visualizing Cultures, and STAR on May 28, 2009.

Ok, what information did I include there or should I have included? (So this is just journalism 101.) The 5 Ws (Who, What, Where, When, Why) and How. But is that really the best order?

Cut to what I think we should be doing on the OEIT website. I think we should have an image or collage of images from the event, coupled with a teaser to get readers to read on. So, instead of the sentence above, I might write…

Modified as a “teaser”:

Share Fair keynote highlights educational innovation at MIT for 120 K-12 teachers, administrators and instructional technologists. Innovations highlighted by Jeff Merriman and Brandon Muramatsu on May 28, 2009 were MIT OpenCourseWare and Highlights for High School, Visualizing Cultures, and STAR.

The first sentence is the key, and its written so that even if it gets truncated the major points are still there. The intent is to try and get the reader to want to follow the link to the presentation.

This is not to say that sentence is perfect, but it’s better. For example, I’m not sure I like the use of the word “Innovation” to lead off the second sentence, but it does highlight the fact that we talked about “innovation” (you could, of course argue that ).

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