Taking inspiration

I've been thinking about the things I hate about Powerpoint presentations and I've decided that, although minimalism can be attractive in some contexts, just having a lot of black text on a white background doesn't always help me take in a message.  Too often I find myself being turned off by what a speaker is saying if their presentation fails to show they've really thought about how they are going to convey their message.  This might be an irrational point of view to adopt, and I'm sure I've been guilty of doing this myself in the past, especially when under pressure to produce new content each week...

So, as I had a few spare hours (at least in theory) yesterday, I thought I'd try and spruce up a set of slides I presented to my Level 3 students on a New Media & Society module, taking inspiration from a few User Experience designers I admire from the world of video game design (especially this guy). You can find the results below.  The finished article took me way longer than I thought and I'm not convinced that all the extra effort (ie eye candy) was worth it.  Let me know what you think...

Mac309 viral media and gamification

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EDIT: For some strange reason, the embedded slides are showing some of the old template (slides 2 and 3!) instead of the new revised slides.  Click through to Slideshare and only the revised content is there. Weird. I guess this may be a caching issue on the site itself as I replaced the older slides from yesterday with these ones from today.


/Annoyed

MAC309 Viral Loops

Here's the slides from this week's sessions on why sharing is caring - viral loops and social media

I draw quite heavily from the work of Adam Penenberg's book "Viral Loop" for some of the early slides. It's worth a read - he charts the origins of successful business that have harnessed the power of what he calls "pass-it-on".  It's a very accessible book, not overly bogged down with theory.

I also used these slides which I've posted here before.  In these slides I talked about how the reposting of information regarding the 10th Iranian Elections helped bring the world's attention to the plight of the everyday citizens of Tehran, Iran during the disputed democratic elections.  I also looked at the problems facing those people who found that their messages were being amplified via retweets (effectively a human created viral loop) and recirculated against the context of state scrutiny and attention.

There are some slides about Twitter's use in Mumbai that I'll add here later if I can find them

Panic in the streets of Mumbai

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