Reviewed by Kim Holland, Instructional Designer, Teaching Support Centre.
As instructors, many of us use presentation software, such as PowerPoint or Keynote, to present content to our students. The slides that we create represent an entirely new language of communication and involve a compendium of challenges. Formal training, or experience with thinking visually, is usually the missing piece. If you have an important story to tell, concept to explain, or process to elucidate that involves slides to create memorable experiences, you now have an easy-to-read resource. |
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Slide:logy by Nancy Duarte addresses this common failing of using a visual medium, that is, its lack of communication. This book is more than slides and design tricks (it does have those); it is about visual communication for impact.Slide:ology was written for an audience who has found the common slide presentation boring, uninteresting, or unintelligible. The current crop of presentation software is designed to be easy to use and to create those slides that you need for tomorrow’s lecture, but its ease of use does come with some costs. Your obliging software has just created another ‘death by PowerPoint lecture.’ Nancy Duarte’s design philosophy can make this near death experience a thing of the past. She begins her book with two chapters entitled Creating a New Slide Ideology and Creating Ideas, Not Slides in which she sets the tone for the entire book. This beginning is reinforced with numerous case studies, most drawn from the corporate world, which illustrate how people use the right set of graphic tools in the ‘right way’ to make an impact that can change people’s minds.When I first started to read Slide:ology, I was slightly annoyed by the many corporate examples; I was looking for examples drawn from education. I wanted the answer to the question: ‘How can I improve my teaching with presentation software?’ As I continued to read, however, the question became: ‘How can I use these ideas so my students learn better?’ When asking this latter question, I was rewarded with a wealth of possibilities.If you are looking for ideas to improve your students’ learning by applying good graphic design and presentation skills, do read this book … but please read the whole book, and perhaps you, too, will be changed. |
