I’ve just spent the last month or so making slides for my talk at the National Library about Second Life Libraries next Tuesday.
JESSAMYN WEST’S HTML
I try not to use proprietary software if possible, so at first I thought I’d use Jessamyn West’s HTML slide method, which is simple and elegant and very lightweight. They allow you to add notes and to select a “print” version for printing.
JO KAY’S PRETTY SECOND LIFE SLIDES
But then, I saw Jo Kay’s slides which she uses when she talks about Second Life and Australian educators. I just had to have me some of ’em – so, with Jo’s blessing, I stole the idea and made my first ever PowerPoint slides. Jo has taken snapshots in Second Life and used them as the background to her dot points…very pretty and shows the environment of Second Life comprehensively.
KEVIN YANK’S SCREENCAST
Another set of slides which caught my eye this week are Kevin Yank’s slides from a talk he did for VALA libraryfolk in Melbourne in November 2006 about Recognising Web 2.0. He’s made a screencast using the live audio (including audience responses) from his talk as the soundtrack to the relevant slides. There is a captioned version, which somehow made his points clearer still. It would have been nice if the questions from the floor were audible as well as the answers – but it’s a small quibble.
STEPHEN ABRAMS AND CUTE KITTENS
I also like Stephen Abram’s slides, like the 124 he made for this talk, The Social Library2.0, before the SLA New York Chapter on 10 January 2007. Who wouldn’t at least be interested by someone who started a talk with a picture of a gun pointing at a kitten? (Yay! this is the third post I get to tag “kittens”).
THE LESSIG METHOD
My favourite, favourite slides of all are from copyright guru Lawrence Lessig. He uses aroung 250 slides each talk, many of them with a single white word in typewriter font on a black background. His timing and recall is perfect, so he will have a single word emphasising the key point of a sentence as he utters it. Here is an example, a talk about Free Culture at OSCON in 2002. People now write about the “Lessig Method” of making slides.
SLIDESHARE.NET
Another slidey sort of discovery recently is slideshare.net. It’s like Flickr or YouTube, but for slides. Watch out for my Flying Librarians of Oz slides appearing there mid-February, under the username sirexkat.