This TED Talks by Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, demonstrates visually the warped world view presented by US network television, where Anna Nicole Smith and Britney dwarf all international news except Iraq.

The map above represents the seconds dedicated to news stories by country in February 2007, a month when North Korea announced plans to dismantle its nuclear facilities, there was massive flooding in Indonesia and in Paris the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced its study on the impact of human behaviour on global warming. She attributes this absence of international focus to the lack of foreign bureaus, which have been reduced by half. There are no network news bureaus in India, Africa or South America – home to 2 billion people.

“The reality is that covering Britney is cheaper”.

It would be interesting to conduct a survey that explores that numbers of journalists working at networks and newspapers generally. Anecdoctally, there are less journalists who have to produce more stories but we all know that quantity does not mean quality. It takes time and money to produce quality journalism, especially investigative pieces and while, like teachers, most journalists are not there to make lots of money the declining real wages of journalists impacts of the quality of the news that we receive. It is ironic that in this information age, most online, print and television news is recycled from the wire or worse, press releases.

All I can say is “thank god for the ABC“. Australia’s publicly-funded, advertising-free broadcaster has a loyal and sizeable following and takes seriously its mission to inform the nation. Most of my international news comes from the ABC, which unlike commercial, profit-driven networks, maintains a genuine commitment to investigative reporting, accountability and knows the difference between what’s in the public interest and what the public are interested in.

He says: “For over a hundred years our education system has been putting students in small desks in straight rows and trying to force them to remain enthralled for hours on end.”

“If you are one of the teachers who has been trying to enthrall your students constantly and have been frustrated by this experience, today is the day to stop pursuing that goal all the time. Stop trying to enthrall your students and instead strive to engage them. ”

Providing students with choices about what they learn and the ways they express their learning means that they are more likely to become personally invested in what they are learning. This opens up opportunities to make learning empowering and relevant. I can only remember one subject, Society and Culture (often criticised for its lack of academic rigour), where I had the opportunity to do this in school. I researched the “Fall of Communism” and can still remember spending hours researching and thinking about complex issues and making historical and contemporaneous connections. It seems a shame that students often have to wait until postgraduate level until they are given genuine options for self-directed learning. There are a couple of progressive courses in NSW (Australia) that offer this, Year 12 (Senior Year) English and History extension. These courses provide students with the chance to research subjects of their choice but the product they are allowed to create, in history anyway, is still confined to a traditional essay format – strictly no mashups or collaboration allowed.

Fryer discusses the way we can engage students rather than insisting that they memorise content whilst we either bore them to death by writing endless notes on the board or attempt to ‘enthrall” them with tricks a ringmaster would envy. The key is helping students to become experts, rather than demanding that they sit still, stay “on task” and listen for hours on end. Teachers, he says, can encourage “students to collaborate with each other to create authentic knowledge products that reflect their true understanding, perception and mastery of the subject being studied and devise assessment and have students help devise assessments that cannot be faked: A worksheet or study guide will not suffice.”

We can measure our success by:

• the number of questions students ask and strive to answer in their products
• the amount of higher level thinking reflected in the products they make together
• the choices have to learn, express, create and share their ideas

Thanks Wes, I’m going to hang up my leotard for a while…

Photo: Matt Miegel

The Sydney Morning Herald recently featured an article titled Research points finger at PowerPoint. The basic argument is that since people can’t read and listen well at the same time, PowerPoint presentations should be put out of their misery.
Presentation guru, Garr Reynolds discusses this in a post titled, “Is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint?” and comes to the conclusion that “the way PowerPoint is used should be ditched, not the tool itself”. The boredom associated with most PowerPoint presentations is because people read the slides (yawn) to the audience whereas, it is more “effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.”

Apple’s Steve Jobs is renowned as one of the world’s best presenters and if you watch his Macworld 2007 Keynote Address, you can see Keynote/PowerPoint presentation at its best – a persuasive speech with useful visual aids.

In a related post, Stewart Mader points out how “the misguided use of PowerPoint is a classic case of the scope and design of a project being dictated by the technology, when it should be the other way around”. His presentation below outlines some of the common mistakes made in PowerPoint presentations.

[slideshare id=33398&doc=the-zen-aesthetic-15185&w=425]

This humourous presentation by engineer turned comedian Don McMillan also highlights some of the mistakes many make when using PowerPoint and shows how you can use this as a tool to drive home your point.

These winners of the 2007 Slideshare Awards also demonstrate that HOW your information is presented is vital to getting across your message in an engaging, informative and persuasive way and how “less is always more”. Judge Guy Kawasaki said “the commonality you’ll see in these winners is big fonts, big graphics, and a “storytelling” orientation. These are three crucial qualities of a good presentation”.

[slideshare id=33834&doc=shift-happens-23665&w=425]

[slideshare id=35461&doc=meet-henry-13821&w=425]

Related links:

• Should we use any notes in presentations?
• Does PowerPoint make us stupid? David Byrne turns PowerPoint into art

Image: http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2007/04/is_it_finally_t.html