Over the past year Zoom has become one of the dominant modes of digital communication for teaching, holding meetings, and even social gatherings. You will prepare a five-minute presentation to deliver to your classmates over Zoom by sharing your screen and using Google Slides, in which you will research and present how technology (broadly defined) has changed or otherwise influenced a specific aspect of society in the past five years. You have wide latitude to choose the topic. You might, for instance, study how camera-equipped drones are being used to shoot Hollywood films or player tracking technology being incorporated by NBA teams. Your presentation should have a clear message or interpretation about the technology’s impact and use concrete, compelling examples to illustrate the change.
The goal of this assignment is twofold. First, thematic: you will learn about the interplay between technology and society and its impacts on culture, economy, business, etc. In addition to learning about your individual topic, the class will learn collectively through watching classmates’ presentations. Second, you will develop skills and strategies for both effectively communicating and consuming content through this medium. Each of you will listen to each other’s presentations, but will be tasked with taking notes for two other classmates offering feedback on the organization, clarity, and intellectual heft of the presentation’s content along with more technical aspects such as volume and pacing, slide design and visual layout, etc. You will separate into these smaller groups to go over feedback, with each person taking notes on your classmates’ comments.
You will then revise the presentation, taking into account feedback from your peers and Professor Blevins, and give it a second time on your own by using Zoom’s record meeting feature, which will save it as a video file. To share this revised presentation, create a new post in your sandbox website, write a 1-2 paragraph summary of the main pieces of feedback you tried to incorporate between your first and second presentations, and then upload and embed the video file into the page.
Due Week 3: in class on 2/3
Revised version due between 2/4 and 2/18. Send a URL to Professor Blevins over Slack to your post