Vivid Ideas Inc.

Recently I was introduced to an amazing short video by Michael Wesch.  Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist exploring the impacts of new media on human interaction also known as Digital Ethnography.  He is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. 

The video was created by using CamStudio for the screen captures and Sony Vegas for the panning/cropping/zooming animations. He mentions that someday he might make a video tutorial for those who are interested.  I sure hope he does! 

Another thing that I found exciting is that Wesch has only been teaching for four years and he is rocking the world - through his use of Social Media and his study of it!!  

Larry Lessig did a talk at TED in 2007 entitled How creativity is being strangled by the law.

I have two reasons for posting this talk on my blog.  First this talk feeds right into the other post I am making today regarding Michael Wesch's great talk about how the web is taking creativity, copyright and many other things off into an unimagined direction.  Secondly,  Larry Lessig well known for a certain type of presentation which has been deemed "The Lessig Method".  So his talk is also interesting to watch as a presentation method.   

He frequently uses white-on-black typewriter font and has the words type across as he talks in sync with it. But most importantly he uses phrases as anchors into his talk: the slides are signposts that let you glance up and pull out key words and ideas from his talk.

Dick Hardt took the use of anchors and sign posts to a whole other level in his talk Identity 2.0 presented at OSCON 2005.   Andrew Dugan of SixMinutes does a good analysis of  Dick Hardt's use of the Lessig Method.  I have embedded Dick Hardt's presentation below so you can watch it here.   His talk actually fits right into the this talk series of Lessig's and the one from Wesch in the next post.

Though this does not directly have to do with presentation, I have been sending this talk on to so many clients and to so many friends, I decided I should post it here.  This is a TED talk.  I repeatedly recommend that presenters watch TED talks. This one is no exception.  Note how much information is powerfully conveyed in a mere 18 minutes!!

On December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor woke up to discover that she was experiencing a rare form of stroke, an arterio-venous malformation (AVM).  As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke.

This talk is a first person account of the difference between the right and left brain hemispheres.  Taylor watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness ...   Amazed to find herself alive, she spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk.  As a brain researcher she was able to observe, and now convey, the hemisperes operate separately and how we ourselves can choose to use both sides more effectively and in balance.

Taylor has become a spokesperson for the possibility of coming back from a brain injury stronger than before.  She has written a book detailing the shutting down of her brain and what she needed to recover completely.  The book, titled “My Stroke of Insight,” serves as a guide for recovering brain function.