Fellow Social Media Today member Maggie Fox recently delivered the first-ever User Generated Presentation at the CapCHI 2007 workshop “Web 2.0: The Human Web” in Ottawa, ON, Canada. She discusses some important points about building a user-generated presentation:

1. Don’t start with PowerPoint, because that will get the group into passive mode.
2. Use a collaborative tool to record the session.
3. Don’t forget to cover the basics. (actually, I used this as a backup, borrowing a list of questions Brian had posted on his blog in case the conversation stalled; we didn’t actually get to those).
(Source: Maggie Fox – The first-ever User Generated Presentation)

Nathan Gillatt discusses this further on his blog, and Garr Reynolds looks at this is a post aptly titled, “Is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint?”. Both conclude that it’s not time to ditch PowerPoint the tool, but “PowerPoint” the method. For far too long people have made presentations using PowerPoint that are poorly developed, essentially speaker’s notes on screen. My Zen Aesthetic presentation looks at the problem of underdeveloped presentations:

The misguided use of PowerPoint is a classic case of the scope and design of a project being dictated by the technology, when it should be the other way around. The User-generated presentation is an excellent idea because what’s covered by the presentation can be decided by the audience, making it much more relevant than the boring slide decks we’ve come to associate with a “PowerPoint” presentation. When you build a user-generated presentation, wiki can be an ideal tool for gathering input and collaborating on the content of your slides.