Tag Archives: lsl

My dissertation presentation: A work in progress

So, I got an email from the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education in Singapore about a Research Scientist position in New Media that I applied for. They want a Skype interview next week! While that is awesome, it’s also complicated. They want me to prepare a 15 minute presentation to launch the interview (which I’m taking as more a conversation to get to know each other). I hadn’t yet created a job talk, so a couple of days ago I started working on one.

The thing is, I don’t really want to do a powerpoint slideshow. A couple of weeks ago, while brainstorming with ESTG different ways for how a conference session could be more participatory, Phil quickly showed me prezi.com. (The conference session mentioned is the one I’m in with Moses Wolfenstein, Ben DeVane, Sara Grimes, and Sarah Walter at the Digital Media and Learning conf later this month!)

Here’s my prezi so far:

What’s cool about prezi is that it isn’t as linear as powerpoint can be. You can zoom in and out of points of interest, which works really well, since it lets one load a presentation with a ton of info that can be dived into or not, depending on the circumstances of the presenting. I think what I’m going to try to do is fill my prezi in as much as possible but then just cover the high-level stuff in 15 minutes. At the same time, I’ll share the url with the search committee and they can explore different avenues of my research independently of me giving the presentation. What’d be cool is if people could comment with a live twitter feed or somesuch at the same time as a presentation… or maybe non-live comments a la YouTube.