Presentations

Multimedia Electronic Presentations

The core of my material is multimedia based and live and so the paper equivalent is a 'little thin' in comparison.

I seem to remember reading that there are a number of things which presenters and speakers should bear in mind when delivering material to any audience:

1. Start with a beginning
2. Finish with an end
   and in the middle:
3. Leave enough signposts for the audience to allow them to get out of the session what they want.

• Tell the audience what you're going to say
• Say it,
• Tell the audience what you've just said

If these are broad guidelines to be followed then a good presentation has the potential to be enhanced by making it electronic and by further addition of multimedia elements and a bad presentation ........

This presentation will, therefore, have a definite beginning, an in-between bit and an end!!

The presentation will have two parts.

1. A little bit of history describing the facilities available to Leeds Metropolitan University staff for electronic and multimedia presentations and
2. A multimedia presentation using PowerPoint

I have to lay my cards on the table and say I believe that, for an electronic presentation to have suitable multimedia elements, either a lot of time has been spent getting appropriate multimedia materials or that its inclusion has been contrived. My own presentation is a strange mixture in that, ostensibly, it s a multimedia presentation about Multimedia. I ve used it in the past as a first lecture to introduce multimedia computing to students and it s undergone evolutionary change over a period of about 18 months. In this presentation, however, I expect that it will be viewed in a quite different way and welcome its dissection in light of discussion during the 2 day workshop.

You'll notice that the title of this presentation has bits 'struck out' 'Multimedia Electronic' Presentations and this in part is a measure of some of the conflict which I feel occurs as soon as we try to do too much with an electronic presentation. A presentation of any type can involve an audience in many ways and (research seems to show) those requiring audience participation or feedback have a stronger chance of being remembered. However multimedia presentations do not lend themselves easily to this interactivity and therefore interactive multimedia (using current technology) has little to do with presentations (unless the presenter is a strong media component!).

The presentation uses the following PowerPoint facilities:

1. Launching a second presentation from another presentation (embedded presentation)
2. Hiding a slide or sequence of slides
3. Transitions
4. Bullet point builds and dimming of earlier points
5. Templates and Wizards
6. Use of Master slides
7. Inclusion of clip-art, sound (Wave and Midi), animation and video
8. 'Hidden' hot-spots for launching multimedia “applets”
9. Objects embedded using Object Packager
10. OLE embedding of executable files
11. Media Clip objects embedded and subsequent use of media player and play settings for object playback control.

Having just typed the above list, I wonder how this presentation will hang together or whether it will actually seem very contrived with lots of multimedia “bolted on” for effect. I already have my own thoughts on the matter!

Graphics     Multimedia      Virtual Environments      Visualisation      Contents