Presentations

Microsoft's PowerPoint and Corel's Presentations are examples of presentation software. All of you are going to use PowerPoint to present your oral reports. Some of you may also use it to present storyboards for the website you'll propose as part of your final report.

Typically, a presentation has a predetermined order and the presenter controls the clicker. To that extent, it's more digitized old media than new media. However, presentations have a solid place in the new media future because they can easily be delivered over a distributed network. They won't ever be new media until they become interactive -- and then they're not presentations anymore.

After you learn PowerPoint, you will find a flatter learning curve for the others. The two most popular after Powerpoint are Gold Disk's Astound and Adobe's Persuasion. Taking a step up in complexity and power, you'll find Adobe's Premiere at the top of the popularity lists for casual users. At their top ends, Persuasion and PowerPoint can do much of what Premiere can. The folks at Adobe have some tips and case studies that show you how to better use their products on the job.

Premiere has a host of higher-end (more expensive and more powerful) competitors, such as Broadway. With Broadway, you can not only capture and edit video on your PC, you can drop it into any presentation application. At that level, including such products as Media100, you can make commercials for the TV networks. You'll find more info about this category of software by searching for non-linear video editors. On the lower end (very inexpensive but less powerful), you'll find a few by searching for the same phrase at Shareware.com, Download.com, or Windows.com.

To get your presentations to play on whatever computer you're using at home, at work, or on the road, you'll find the software on Microsoft's PowerPoint pages.

Another step up in complexity and power will take you to programs such as Macromedia's Director. At Medaille, the next-most-recent version is available for you to use on the Macs in M033.

Basically, you learned this in kindergarten as show and tell. On the other end of the scale, you've seen thousands of hours of professional presentations on TV and video. You've suffered through or enjoyed many presentations at meetings on the job and in the community. Use those experiences to help you choose what to read at these sites:

Presentations magazine

Their new web site, divided into Creating, Delivering, and Technology, is developing into a good one-stop shop. Check out one of the current featured articles called "Meet your future: 13 ways presenting will change".

Presenters University

The Courses area will lead you to a lot of good advice. The Library area will lead you to the templates and clip art I mentioned in class. There's more on the In Focus Free Stuff page.

CBT Solutions

Please read Dawn Adams's solid introductory article What's the Story. Bryan Chapman's article Storyboards and Interactive Media goes into a little more detail. If you need more, check out the CBT archives.

I would also be happy to lend you a CD-ROM called "The Interactive Gide to Effective Presentations." It's part public speaking and part digital tips & tricks. Sony sent it to me, so it's also going to try to sell their products.

Also, the MBA 604 evaluation pages have similar ideas.

Note on vocabulary I separate digitized old media -- for example,  presentations, brochureware, and product catalogs on CD-ROM or the Web -- from the interactive, many-to-many networks of new media.

To help this page grow, ask a what-about or why question and I'll respond with more resources.