Information, Hands, Presentations, Gurus, & Internet

On the information alarmageddon - Mind Hacks

New York Magazine has an article arguing that the concerns about digital technology drastically affecting our minds is just hype. I really wanted to like it but it's just another poorly researched piece on the psychology of digital technology.

The Case for Working With Your Hands - New York Times

Matthew Crawford's story of working with your hands, to middle managers to being a knowledge worker:

The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.

In the article the author writes that when he wrote abstarcts for reseach reports he could write any nonsense whatever as there was no consequence for him, the only standard was for the grammar to be correct. This is probably one of the main reasons why we have so much bad research in the learning and development field, such as the 10% transfer of training myth — the people writing such crap rely on abstacts that were written by other people who do not even understand the reports they creating abstracts for, which takes us back to the first news item above, "On the information alarmageddon" &mash; we want information in sound bites.

10 Powerpoint Tips for Preparing a Professional Presentation - makeuseof.com

Presentations - whether they are made with Powerpoint or other applications, are a great way to support a speech, visualize complicated concepts or focus attention on a subject. However, a bad presentation can achieve the opposite. Badly designed slides with too much text or bad graphics can distract or worse, irritate the audience. For more on presentations, see Presentation Skills.

For This Guru, No Question Is Too Big - New York Times

Should the author of "Good to Great" have called it "Good to Average?"

The Internet in 1969 - YouTube

Are we there yet?