{"id":175,"date":"2008-09-09T15:14:19","date_gmt":"2008-09-09T21:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/?p=175"},"modified":"2008-09-09T15:24:26","modified_gmt":"2008-09-09T21:24:26","slug":"powerpoint-creativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/2008\/09\/09\/powerpoint-creativity\/","title":{"rendered":"PowerPoint Creativity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m generally inclined to agree with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2003\/TECH\/ptech\/12\/30\/byrne.powerpoint.ap\/\">Vint Cerf&#8217;s twist<\/a> on the famous anarchist slogan: &#8220;Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>Nonetheless, many of us&#8212;myself included&#8212;end up using slides anyway. Done right, they <i>can<\/i> be a very good thing. <\/p>\n<p>A fellow Minnesota grad student, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.soc.umn.edu\/grad\/directory\/longhofer.php\">Wes Longhofer<\/a>, has developed a unique style of PowerPointing that really pushes the technology in a fun, creative way.  I asked Wes if I could share one of his presentations here, and he said yes: <a href=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/files\/longhofer-slides.pdf\">Download the PDF here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll mostly let the slides speak for themselves, but a few notes: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This is for an introductory Political Sociology class. As you&#8217;ll see, the readings for this class were Domhoff&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.whorulesamerica.net\/\">Who Rules America?<\/a>, John Gaventa&#8217;s <i>Power and Powerlessness<\/i>, and Thomas Frank&#8217;s &#8220;What&#8217;s the Matter with Kansas?&#8221;<sup><a href=\"#footnote_0_175\" id=\"identifier_0_175\" class=\"footnote-link footnote-identifier-link\" title=\"Of special value to Wes &amp; I as we are both native Kansans.\">1<\/a><\/sup><\/li>\n<li>All frames within each slide are displayed at once in the PDF, though you can easily picture how the various arrows, highlights and questions on each slide appear one-at-a-time during the presentation. Because of all the crazy fonts &amp; images Wes uses, distributing the original PowerPoint file isn&#8217;t really an option.<\/li>\n<li>There are four movie clips embedded in the presentation (obviously they&#8217;re not included in the PDF&#8212;you&#8217;ll just see a placeholder image). In order, they are:\n<ol>\n<li>A clip from the film &#8220;Wag the Dog&#8221; about political spin.<\/li>\n<li>A clip from &#8220;Century of Self&#8221; on the role of psychoanalysts and the CIA in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government.<\/li>\n<li>A Reagan campaign ad from 1984.<\/li>\n<li>An anti-Howard Dean ad from 2004 about &#8220;latte-drinking&#8221; liberal &#8220;freak shows.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<li>This particular class meets only once a week in 2.5 hour sessions, in case you were wondering how so much material could possibly be covered in one class.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And Wes puts this kind of care into every lecture he prepares. (Is anyone surprised he won our department&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.soc.umn.edu\/events\/sri\/index.html\">Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award<\/a> this year?)<\/p>\n<h3>Footnotes<\/h3><ol class=\"footnotes\"><li id=\"footnote_0_175\" class=\"footnote\">Of special value to Wes &amp; I as we are both native Kansans. [<a href=\"#identifier_0_175\" class=\"footnote-link footnote-back-link\">&#8617;<\/a>]<\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m generally inclined to agree with Vint Cerf&#8217;s twist on the famous anarchist slogan: &#8220;Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.&#8221; Nonetheless, many of us&#8212;myself included&#8212;end up using slides anyway. Done right, they can be a very good thing. A fellow Minnesota grad student, Wes Longhofer, has developed a unique style of PowerPointing that really pushes the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[584,600,144,308],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-digital-media","tag-powerpoint","tag-teaching","tag-video"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions\/178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}