Week 7: Clear

Don't !

In this week, we were given insights in how to set up a clear and meaningful presentation.  In today's business environment it is crucial to set up presentations to get your meanings, value propositions, or even products spread throughout the more and more globalized world. The lectures for this week were meant to lead us step by step through the next project, namely creating our own presentation. Several issues have to be considered when preparing slides. First of all, the design and layout of your slides should serve the purpose of delivering value to your audience. You shoud minimize distracting elements on your slides by focussing on the main point you want to get across to your listeners. Furthermore, for a presentation to be effective, try to include stories and multimedia (see last week's topic), and try to make your ideas memorable and sticky by including examples.

Do !

Unfortunately, although the different concepts of this weeks topic were clear, the set up of this week's learning material was partly muddy. There were several lectures we had to watch, but none of lhem asted longer than 9 minutes. This makes it very hard to remember all the different hints and insights we were given as information was spread over too many small lectures. Moreover at the beginning of the week there was one lecture incluced twice, whereas another lecture (about storyboards) was still missing, although one of the questions in the quiz was about this particular lecture. But all in all, as the concept of presentations is actually quite clear and plausible, these minor organization weaknesses should not have a negative influence on the project. That is why I still call this post "clear" instead of "muddy".

Week 1: Muddy

Before starting the quiz of week 1, I watched the video "A fair(y) Use Tale" on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo . For me as an exchange student from Germany, this video was really hard to understand. Instead of clear, short and descriptive sentences about copyright, several animated characters speak one word of a particular sentence, which makes the explanations very difficult to understand. This was really muddy and annoying.

Therefore I suggest, to learn about copyright and its implications it would be more helpful to have a look at either http://www.copyright.gov/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright. Of course these websites are not trying to be as "funny" as the video, but instead they are much more informative and clearer to understand. It may be that local students did not have any problems to get the content of the video, but as said above, for me as a non-native English speaker this was quite difficult.

Finally I would like to shortly explain what copyright is about. The term copyright describes a set of rights, exclusively granted to the creator of different kinds of work, e.g. music, films, songs, etc. . These rights include the right to copy, distribute and adapt the created work. Of course there is a lot more to learn about "copyright", its implications and the several details of the law. Therefore I suggest interested readers to have a look at the proposed websites to get informed without having to deal with muddy explanations.