An(other) afternoon with the Shads

This year, I spent another afternoon with the MacShads (Shad Valley students @ McMaster) along with my co-facilitator, Susan.  We wanted to take an opportunity to do some non-library, non-information literacy instruction, free from all fetters of normal expectations. So, what we came up with was to riff off of the MacShad’s overall theme project topic: Canada’s aging population.

To this end, we looked for interesting multimedia that dealt with the topic, and built part of the session around that. The videos we sourced were about depopulation, filial  piety, ageism and ‘curing’ aging. These topics were all very good for sparking interesting lines of questioning and follow-up discussion. Part two of the three-hour session was originally to be a design exercise in creating an ‘age-friendly city’. This was scrapped, because it tread too close to the design challenge the students were working on. Instead, we tried our hand at leading a debate. There were two topics (and four teams, one for each side of each topic). We made clear rules and guidelines for the debate, which propelled it along nicely. Also, I was happy to get a chance to use the Thode Library ThInK Space as it was designed for, as an active learning classroom.

I think that the workshop was fairly successful. The Shads always impress with their knuckle-down work ethic, and there was some good laughs, too.

[Small update: The report that the Shad co-director got from the student leaders was that the students were sleepy during the videos, but better during the discussion. Not exactly the glowing praise we were going for!]

Workshop Slides

Debate Rules

Multimedia Used

White Coat/Black Art podcast – Ageing, Ageism and the Silver Tsunami

Ignite-style Presentation Session for Shad Valley 2009

McMaster annually hosts Shad Valley students for one month during the summer. The integrated science program (starting this summer), iSci, was asked if they wanted to contribute. So, in that capacity, I volunteered to lead one 3-hour session to conclude the topic of communication and the media. I chose to make the students the communicators: they would create and deliver a 5 minute presentation during the session. The catch? The slide presentation would contain 20 slides, and each would display for 15 seconds. This is the ‘ignite‘ format of presentation, and it’s not easy!

The students were game, however, and whipped up presentations (on whatever they wanted to talk about). Obviously, the biggest issue was timing – making sure they were able to speak ‘around’ the 15 second slides. Some spoke too fast to cram information in, and others didn’t have enough to say. Another sticking point was the 20 slide requirement – this was interpreted by many as meaning that their presentation required 20 different ‘ideas’: “I can’t think of 20 things to say!”. This is a common problem with – to borrow from Tufte – the cognitive style of powerpoint presentations. I tried to reinforce the notion that you can share an idea that will take more than 15 seconds; that is, change the slide, but maintain the idea. It was a tough sell!

The presentation below was what I delivered (in the ignite style) to show them how to create theirs.