Increasingly I’m seeing examples of embedded PowerPoint (and other type) presentations in blogs, wikis and websites in general. Essentially what we have is SlideShare which is a sort of YouTube for presentations. It uses the same basic format as YouTube in which you can upload your slides for other users to view, comment on and rate. As per YouTube anyone can view the slides and they can be directly embedded into other web content such as blog entries (see the previous post).
Now for the record I’m not a huge fan of slides since a good and well designed slide show should be so integrated with the speaker such that on its own its meaning will be diminished. And neither am I advocating for staff to use the service (it breaks University copyright to do so). However it is a very good resource for sourcing presentations on given subjects. This is because, as per YouTube videos, uploaded presentations are tagged with keywords. You can then enter specific terms in the SlideShare search box and this will pull out slides which match the terms. Try ‘education’ for instance.
And despite my earlier comment some of the slideshows are very good.
Oh and another nice feature is that you can upload the slide notes as well.
The presentation below is by David Warlick on the issues surrounding preparing students for the future work place (and as to how that workplace is an unknown).
View SlideShare
[slideshare id=56542&doc=flat-world-flat-web-flat-classrooms-25003&w=425]