Speaking to a group of students at Peabody College Grad School--Web 2.0 for Us

Just to chronicle a diversion in my normal path in working with teachers, upon the invitation of a colleague at my school (the wonderful Genie Tanner), I stepped into "higherhigher" education Friday early evening. More or less successfully tailoring my Web 2.0 for Us evangelic message to the assembled group of 15 or so graduate students in the College of Human Development, in a class entitled "Advanced Information Systems," I struck out across the street armed with a wiki page I'd slapped together in the morning as a fulcrum. The tools I share are so dynamic and immediate in nature, somehow locking down a talk about them into a framework of sequential bullet points seems counterproductive.

I explained early on to the mostly business-centered students that I was trying to wean myself from PowerPoints. I predict that I will return to presentation software someday, but I'm not going to use it at all for a while.

See below for the simple wiki notes page I made, and the one Genie put up on their own wiki during my interaction with the students . Both of us were 'sperimenting :). Here's the interesting thing, at least to me: Compare the two and you'll see how my non-linear approach enabled me to play off questions and ad hoc insights to share more than I may have shared with a traditional PowerPointy presentation. If you are in the presentation "game," how do you pull it off? Are you grounded in PowerPoint? What else works well!?