The Social Life of PowerPoint Presentations (or why I really love SlideShare)

On Tuesday, I facilitated an introductory workshop on how nonprofits can use social media in Boston at the nonprofit technology conference and yet another remix of the curriculum wiki, presentation, and game designed by David Wilcox.   

Deborah Finn was a participant and shared some of her thoughts here.  (BTW, she says that I "dropped science" but she means the 1st definition, not the fourth!  It gave my seven year old a good laugh!)

Deborah Finn also goes on to mention that she hopes to remix some of the content - and that is the intention by using the Creative Commons licensing.   She is the third person to mention a remix.  I got an email from an instructor at Standard University continuing education who plans to remix it and an email from someone in Italy who will translate the game and fundraising case study into Italian.   So, I decided to set up a community wiki where we can share templates and other material related to mixing and remixing the game.

Which brings me to the reason why I love SlideShare ...  SlideShare is a social networking site that lets you share Powerpoint presentations.  I've been using now for six months and I'm an addict.

My wildest dream would be for many nonprofits to upload and share powerpoint presentation (and screencasts) and we could remix each other's work - it would save us time and help build knowledge.

In fact, I have a "Remix This PowerPoint" presentation up on slide share right now!

I use Slide Share everyday to increase my personal knowledge about social media and consume whatever I can find related to nonprofits.  There is not yet a critical mass of nonprofit specific content.   Maybe more people will share their materials.   I set up a nptech group there and have been tagging slide shows I've discovered that might be useful others with the nptech tag.   I invited folks to join the nptech group .. so far only a few have joined and uploaded ... it takes time for people shift their desktop habit 

Setting up a group to share powerpoints from a conference would be awesome .. obvious .. I know I have seen other groups do that, but no nonprofits yet.

Oh, one other benefit of slideshare for me - I am trainer and have taught people presentation techniques -- good powerpoint .. and I have learned so much about that from just browsing other people's slide shows if the content is totally unrelated to what I'm teaching ... .. it has definitely improved my slide shows ...

I've found slideshare extremely useful for collaboration.  I put up the draft in slideshare and let my  collaborators download and remix.  Much better than emailing as attachment.

If you're lucky to be at the next Netsquared Net Tuesday, Jonathan Boutelle from SlideShare will be presenting along with Cindy Li from Scrapblog (another web-based app I just love because I'm a paper artist and it lets me experiment with the art form online in a social context.)

Comments

[John Sanders]

I've thought about doing something like this in Western Australia. I have started with Edward Tufte's stuff to legit my approach. I am retired from full time work so i can wait while people/clients understand what I can offer.

[Nick Hansen]

I use iSpring free to convert my powerpoint presentations to flash and found out that SlideBoom appeared. This is a service to share your presentations which I liked a lot, similar to SlideShare with one difference: it saves your animation effects too. I am sure that this is worth taking a look at.