CPD23 Thing 17 cont’d – Slideshare as the silent world

You know what they say about less haste… I forgot to put in anything about Slideshare in my original Thing 17 blog….

Would I put any of my presentations up on it?

Thinking about this my presentations fall into three categories

1. Oft-given and with a changing section that is up-dated each time.

2. Oft-given but not for a while so in need of up-dating.

3. One-off point in time presentations.

So yes, one-off point in time presentations no problem. But I wouldn’t go back and up-date something just for the sake of posting it somewhere. And with ones I give where the content changes a bit each time…. Well that disinclines me because the ‘current’ version changes sometimes twice a year.

Does the Slideshare environment change the context?

I’m also thinking that without the spoken word, audience, interactivity, it’s quite a different beast a presentation. Ideally I’d augment it before putting it on Slideshare (the silent world) for that reason.

What do I tend to use Slideshare for as a punter?

Mostly to try and track down Conferences and events I was interested in but couldn’t attend. I’ll end up following the hashtag, looking for blogs, looking for anything posted on Slideshare.  It depends on the event, but for some that combination of mediums does get you fairly close to what you missed and is a wonderful thing.  So I tend to be looking quite specifically…

What does a quick look at some presentations on Slideshare tell me?

Well I was highly amused to be reminded that something I jointly gave is already on it – I’d totally forgotten about this to be honest. So coming across that was amusing. Generally I conclude that the sheer volume of things on Slideshare allied to lack of obvious authority level or reliability information on some things is a bit of a problem. I want to know what date it was, who gave it, what’s their level of knowledge and expertise on the subject. Often that information is there, often it isn’t.  It’s also things like has the subject moved on, do I know enough about it to realise if this is the case?

I also noticed just how visual a lot of it was. I’m a words-based person (one overall look at this blog tells you that). I think presentations probably divide into those put together by visual people and those put together by text-based people. Which do you do first and augment with the second?  I know I tend to do images last, I ‘squeeze’ them in. Which you would think makes me a PowerPoint person. But I rather enjoyed Prezi, which I think is far more a visual medium.  I was also astounded to see some folk actually used the Script part of their Powerpoint – I’ve never done this in my life, I tend to talk to headings, it’s just my style.  However for Slideshare with a very visual presentation it would definitely help impart the subject matter.

In conclusion

For one-off presentations I think Slideshare would be sensible to upload to where I want to give audience easy access to the full thing without bits of paper and allow wider access. So, next time I’m doing a one-off I will… but it might be augmented slightly for the different environment from what I give on day.