Wow, my first post in over a year. I am back :)
When you have a lot of information to push to a crowd, PowerPoint is not the tool for the job. Recently I had the opportunity to present at a local Web Technology Meetup Group in town. I was presenting on how to setup a membership-style website and I was going to be pushing a lot of data to them over the 90 minute presentation.
So, I went “old school” and made a handout. I planned on projecting the handout on the screen and plowing through the information as they followed along. I could jump over large blocks of “self explanatory” info if time ran short. As I started preparing the handout I kept thinking about:
- Will I print off enough to take to the meeting?
- Will they loose the handout… Or will the dog eat it.
- The handout ended up containing a ton of hyperlinks. It was going to be a pain in the butt for them to keyboard in all those links.
- I also knew that the handout would need to be updated to keep the information relevant.
So, I took an old school media and gave it a technology twist. I prepared the handout as a Google Document and then published it as a public web page. I printed 30 copies of the document to take to the meeting. I received a lot of compliments on the handout and the fact that I published it as a web page. In case the advantages of this are not obvious to you, let me reflect on how this worked out…
- Everybody at the meeting would get a “handout”. Even if 100 people attended, 30 would get one of the printed copies I brought, but they all could get a fresh copy as soon as they could get to a computer.
- When they viewed the document as a webpage, all the links were live!
- The handout became a “living” document. I update the document almost weekly as I learn more about this topic.
In Summary
This turned out even better than I thought it would. When I am in a forum and someone one asks a questions that I know I covered in the doc, I just give them a link to it and refer to the page with the answer. I have started getting questions about the subject from people around the world. Apparently writing a pretty good paper makes you an expert :) By placing my handout in the public web space, the conversation did not stop at the ennd of my 90 minute presentation. It lives on..,
This technique could be used in many educational environments. Most schools provide a LMS for content delivery, but this technique is so simple it is stupid. You could use it when you want the information to be available to those even outside the classroom. Each time you put a well written paper in the wild it also have a recruiting/marketing effect.
