I also agree that, as an educational culture, we need to media beyond paper. There’s a proper place and context for everything, though, and I don’t think that the application for a business school is the appropriate context to introduce multimedia, for reasons which I’ve explained here and there.

One note that didn’t find its way into what has to be my longest post ever, Sharon thinks I’ve underestimated the relevance of multimedia skills to business.

I just want to say, yeah, I agree. I did say “largely irrelevant” but that was me trying to hop off this hook. In the past I’ve claimed that everything is relevant to everything. At one time or another, I’ve worked every skill I have into teaching.

But the point is: which of those skills should be a barrier to entry to a teaching college? Or here, to a business college?

While a business grad’s ability to film a brief product sketch and edit it well is doubtlessly relevant to his career, neither I nor Chicago GSB think it’s relevant enough to become a part of the admissions process.

They think (and I totally agree) one’s ability to communicate briefly and powerfully is paramount while multimedia skills, though certainly useful, shouldn’t bar the door.

***

Rant coming up. Maybe a thesis. A fine line in this day and age of rapid-fire publishing without editors standing over the top of your shoulder.

In a Death-by-Powerpoint world, there’s a lot of reasons to cave into bullet-point despair and call it a day. Even worse if you’re a teacher assigning projects with a PPt flair…and have to suffer the visual/mental arrows of your best intentions once the little buggers submit their work.

There is ONLY one thing worse than being a corporate denizen being lulled to sleep in a conference room as a a colleague is slow-lane lumbering through PPt slide 15 (of 35 more to come), proving just how many complete and otherwise lucid/relevant thoughts chopped down to broken-mind bullet points can be crammed onto a single slide all while reading it word for word aloud rather than even hinting at a presentation style and an ability to connect to audience in a slightly meaningful manner.

Agreed. Okay. But what is that “ONLY one thing worse…” business?

The ONLY thing worse than this ubiquitous business scene is being a teacher who has assigned (possibly poorly, let’s be honest) an assignment inviting a bunch of young kids to use PowerPoint as a “multi-media” tool void of any “design” instruction or “constraints” placed on the actual gimmick-vs-substance meter ahead of time.

The ONLY thing worse than that is the same teacher watching her/his beloved kiddos demonstrate a week later what 8 hours of badly conceived design gimmicks (add flying words and oddly sized photos here) and superficial creativity can do to thoroughly dismember and render obsolete/worthless 30 seconds worth of actual research they snuck in via Wikipedia on the final night.

The ONLY thing worse than that is the same teacher who must now sit through an entire class set of kiddos standing in front of the screen without the slightest sense of eye contact’s value, the golden mean of visual balance, or the visual ‘less is more’ and research ‘more is more’ theories.

The ONLY thing worse than that is this same teacher then having to grade them without pandering to the “Well, they did use PPt slides to show off at least one multiple intelligence or another, I think…” rubrics.

[Do you find yourself feeling either guilty or nodding knowingly here?]

Sure, our kids are jivin’ and shakin’ in front of cut-n-paste pictures shown in technicolor on newly installed Smartboards, but are they really demonstrating anything that resembles learning? And maybe as importantly, are they saying anything about themselves as learners and showcasing their “global learning brand” of creative processes?

Why does this matter?

***

So, I’m curious, how do we make this less an argument about the specific tools (PPt, for instance) and the School2.0goodorbad argument (blah, blah, blah scarecrow either way you face it), and focus more and more on helping our K-12 kiddos/students/charges begin to grasp the ‘power of presentation’ in front of all ‘audiences’ they will face and engage?

Dan is spot-on with regards to elevating ‘design’ and ‘presentation’ (although I think it’s fair to say that the whip-the-school2.0-boy posture can be retired so he can dazzle with all the rest that he brings hard/fast to the conversation). To be fair, Sharon, Dan never has advocated that”creativity and good use of multi-media is irrelevant” in any situation — classroom or business or real life.

But back to the point of it all: simply arguing over ‘fluff’ vs. ‘ multi-media as digital god’ seems to ignore the issue.

How do we help our kids grasp the power of presentation?
Esp. when most teachers or business professional themselves have NO idea how to effectively use ‘tech’ to present, or to simply engage an audience F2F with nothing but a legal pad and a decent story.

Curious —
Cheers, Christian

“asks them to submit a 5-minute video or a 5-slide PPT presentation or 5-minute introductory podcast. Not only are these skills mostly irrelevant to the career they’ve chosen but, for all their effort to create them and UC’s to assess them, it’s very questionable how much value they add to either end of the application process.”
I do not believe that creativity and good use of multi-media is irrelevant to a Business Career! This is another thread however.

1. Bravo for Mike M. pushing on the question by posting the original blog post in the first place.
2. Bravo for Scott M. for contacting the university to find out what lay behind the application element.
3. Bravo to Dan M. for reminding me (and all of us) that the university is being innovative and that ‘constraint’s allow for creativity at the end of the day.

Added my own 2centsworth blog-style here
http://thinklab.typepad.com/think_lab/2007/07/4-slides-of-inn.html

Thanks to all of you; been a great conversation to enter today.
Cheers,
Christian

Taking her e-mail at face value, they’d like to use multimedia in their admissions process but lack the infrastructure. This alone makes the original LeaderTalk post seem hasty and misguided. Any remorse for picking on the poor ol’ monolithic institution? Anyone?

A question to satisfy my curiosity: if instead of “print to paper” Chicago GSB demanded its applicants “output to pdf,” is your reaction any different? Because, School 2.0’s allergic reaction to paper notwithstanding, those solutions are exactly the same in their effect.

And, for whatever it’s worth, with some room in my archives for debate, my default reaction when someone “doesn’t get it” skews away from abject frustration and tends towards commiserative pity. I remain too closely connected to my failures to get irritated by anyone making the same mistakes I did. I rarely sense the same largesse from School 2.0 bloggers (in the original post, for example) but maybe I need to broaden my RSS pool.