Having just concluded Daniel Pink's book and our recent five frame story project, I am currently thinking about the relevance of story to provide context and meaning in education. Eugene Lee, Socialtext CEO, perfectly illustrated this key concept during his October 23 visit to our 830 ITEC class.
Mr. Lee interlaced his lecture with very specific personal stories including a detailed story his career path, which led him to job where he has found alignment between his passions and his work. Mr. Lee also told several humourous and engaging story about the use of Twitter as a social and work tool. In the week since the lecture, I have actually relayed Mr. Lee's Twitter stories several times, in order to illustrate a point that I was making regarding the importance of social networking.
Mr. Lee's great use of story gave depth to his presentation and this has given me pause, as I have recently been struggling with a Power Point heavy work environment. It should be noted, that while Mr. Lee did have a perfectly fine Power Point with him it was the personal stories that made the impression.
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2 comments:
Amy,
I was delighted when Lee ignored his PPT deck and told stories; he has leveraged the technology, employing it to a positional advantage in business that few executives ever enjoy---and yet he still displays a genuine delight at the unexpected consequences of its use. His time with us made a strong impact on me, too.
Amy, I am currently also working in a PowerPoint oriented environment. Worse yet, there's a tendency to take instructor-led PowerPoint decks and, using Presenter, publish them to the web. My question is always: where's the added value? Why not just give the learner the PowerPoint deck and let them read that? I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to incorporate the real learning, which happens from instructor anecdotes and class discussion, into the web-based training. Sometimes I do it through narration (although many SMEs would simply like to see the points on the PowerPoint slides narrated, which is to my mind doubly pointless); other times I add further explanation to the notes page or even embed links to other resources. It's a constant struggle, particularly with text-heavy slides. Somehow, however, I don't think twitter is the solution for this particular organization. I'm trying to expand the learning, not condense it. Stories, if I can encourage customers to include them, maybe part of the answer.
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