SlideShare.net - The Joys of Powerpoint!

I always use Powerpoint for my presentations (there are no alternatives), and after almost every conference presentation that I have made in recent years, I have had students asking me for a copy of the Powerpoint file. This is especially true in Asia, where students must have gigabytes of .ppt files on their computers. When this first started happening, I was wary of giving my work away, but now I pretty much let anyone who wants to make a copy -- life is too short to worry about it!

SlideShare.net is website where people can upload their Powerpoint presentations (also works with Open Office and PDF files) to share with the world. This is sort of Youtube for slide presentations. While it is not as entertaining as Youtube (I can waste a lot of time there!), there are gems of information that can be useful for teaching purposes. For those interested in emerging elearning, for example, there are a bunch of presentations about Second Life, several of which focus exclusively on it use in education.

A wide variety of topics are covered by the presentations, and some are approaching 1000 views (probably more by the time many people read this). I uploaded one of my presentations (on "Travel 2.0", below), which I think is a pretty good one. However, many (if not most) of the others are of questionable value. Also, there are a lot of Spanish language presentations that are not easily filtered out (since I do not know any Spanish at all). As a result, it takes a lot of digging to find the gems in this collection -- at least if you are looking for something specific. If not, then just browsing can be fun, just like Youtube!



Click Here to view my presentation in the image above.

"Making Wikipedia Better" - Class Assignment

This comes from The Wired Campus blog and email newsletter (Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 March 07), where you can also follow the discussion.

"Nicola Pratt, a lecturer in international relations at the University of East Anglia, in England, tells The Guardian that she was once one of those "disgruntled" academics who berate students for using Wikipedia in their essays. But then Ms. Pratt had an epiphany: Instead of complaining to her students, why not recruit them to make Wikipedia better? The lecturer is now asking her graduate students to edit eight Wikipedia articles -- on contentious topics related to the politics of the Middle East -- and to make them more balanced. Ms. Pratt has also told students they must create a new article of their own. One hopes students' grades won 't be dependent on articles making it intact through Wikipedia's rough-and-tumble editing process. "

Personally, I think think this is a great idea, especially for a small seminar-like class of seniors or graduate students where not only can content be expanded, but sticky issues of knowledge and epistomology and the role of science and social science in society can be explored.