Let them learn!

Ah the angst! You present, you want people to learn what you have to offer but are you really ready to let them learn in the way that best suits them?

You are thrilled to be acknowledged as an expert in your area but worried that someone may steal your ideas. When you present whether to a conference, a meeting or in any circumstance, you are sharing the ideas and the knowledge you have so that others may benefit by learning from you.

Why are you afraid if someone takes photos of your slides? It's the detail and the expertise you have to offer they will benefit from, not your pretty pictures. Oh no! there's no inspiring images, it is all text and screen dumps - ah, that was how the teacher did it back in school all those years ago. Text heavy presentations invite photography. How else will the learner get to note down all those points you've decided are so important they must be listed? Remember the scramble to copy everything from the blackboard (whiteboard) before the end of class back in school or university days.

Have you provided a place where the audience can retrieve the links you've provided? How will  they remember the long name of that fabulous site or organisation you just mentioned,  - snap, a quick photo will do it. Is it really a surprise that the person who has paid to attend your presentation needs more than the memory of your words to take away, to revisit and learn? If they are busy trying to copy everything from your slides, are they getting the best from your talk?

How do you learn best? Are you a visual learner? Does audio suit you better? Have you supplied the attendee with online notes/slides so they can concentrate on your message? Have you given them notes at the beginning of the presentation? Will the presentation that they have paid for, be accessible?

If not - expect participants to take photos, expect folks to use every means at their disposal to capture the information being presented. Why not share? It is sure to generate more interest and if your presentation was sooo.... good, of course you'll do it again and again, and by the next time you'll have new up-to-date information to add - the slides will be outdated or at least outmoded.

Get your Creative Commons licence here Explain it to your audience too so they understand their rights and responsibilities.

Display a QR code that leads to your slides right at the beginning of your presentation and allow time for participants to scan it. Now they will have your slides on their phone or tablet and need not interrupt you or their neighbours by trying to get a shot of every slide.

One day:

• you will be too old or infirm to present
• the information you have to share will be outdated - let people make good use of it now.

Check up on what you agreed to do. The audience are clients, are you not bound to provide them with best learning experience possible?

I've written this post in response to so many negative things written about participants by some presenters after RootsTech, a large genealogy conference in the USA.  No, I did not attend - out of my budget range, but I learn so much from the caring souls who share their content online. It seems many conference participants were using their phones to photograph slides - it may be that some presenters had not given their audience a variety of other options to access the content. My genimate Jill has also addressed this issue which has prompted me to revisit this post.

I respect copyright and acknowledge sources but thank the YouTubers, the slidesharers, the Facebookers, the edTechers (yes often teachers) bloggers, webinaries, screencasters, geniesharers and too many more to mention. I've learnt and continue to learn from your visuals, audio and text.

All content, your presentations and mine are built on previous knowledge. Where did we get that from? We read, we learnt, we watched, we absorbed, we processed, we were inspired and sometimes we came up with an original idea. Our knowledge is built on the foundations provided by others. We adapt, add to and remix just as suggested in the creative commons licences. Help others learn with your visuals and text.

Slideshare, Dropbox, Box, Google docs and slides, YouTube, blogs and more. There are dozens of ways you can share your content online. Excellent examples of sharing using both paid and freemium models are Thomas MacEntee, Richard Byrne and Lisa Louise Cooke to name but a few. What are you waiting for? Times have changed!



Library Currants by Carmel Galvin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Welcome Wellcome

Today Wellcome has made available a wonderful collection of images,"thousands of years of visual culture"  with Creative Commons licensing. The image above comes with the following details:

A humorous image of two men wearing revolving top hats with several attachments for optical aids and tobacco etc. Coloured etching. 1830 Published: T. McLean,London (26 Haymarket) :  1 January 1830 
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 2.0, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ 

It is wonderful to see the increase in Creative Commons works being made available for all to use and share. Browse and enjoy this newly available selection of images.

Collaborative searching - Learning with jigsaw

photo © 2008 Liza | more info (via: Wylio)

The issue
A common problem with student assignments is the lack of acknowledgement of image sources used within their documents. I wanted to engage the students "who know all about search" at age 13. This was a successful lesson that begins to address those problems.


Objectives

• Familiarisation with Creative Commons, and recognition of the need for attribution
• Introduce a range of search tools for finding CC images
• Foster collaborative learning

How do you engage 13 year old boys who know all about search? I decided to use a jigsaw activity to expose students to a range of search tools not previously encountered.
After viewing and discussing the video about Creative Commons, students numbered off from 1 to 4 around the room. Each student then had the task of  investigating  one of the following search tools according to the number they had been given. They were tasked with the expectation that they would be able to teach someone else about that tool, along with the advantages and disadvantages of using it.

1. Compfight
2. Flickr CC Advanced
3. Wikimedia Commons
4. Morguefile

After about 5 minutes of individual endeavour, each number 1(2,3,4) gathered with his group to share the information they had found. This way any student who missed basic points, learnt from the others and expertise was developed.
The number 1s then paired with a 2, and the 3s with a 4. Each had to teach the other student about the search tool they had used. Then the 1s met with 3s and 2s with 4s, where they now had to explain both the tools they had seen.
This enabled me to help those students less confident and provide some guiding questions to those who needed further assistance; individual attention for those most needing it. Students were well engaged and willingly shared their learning. Movement around the classroom also helps boys' concentration in a 50 min period.
Have you used this jigsaw method? I'll certainly be using it again.
The Jigsaw classroom