Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Handout How-To?

Guest blogger, Rebecca (Becko) Copenhaver, ask this question for feedback:

I'm teaching a course called Philosophical Methods, which focuses on issues of writing, presentation and basic philosophical skills and concepts. My students requested that I teach them how to make handouts for their presentations. While this is a great idea, I don't quite know how to start (it's tacit knowledge for me by now). Does anyone know of any existing resources I might use?

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2 comments:

  1. Rebecca,

    Having not thought about this question before, I'm not sure what sorts of challenges your students are facing. Are they concerned about what content to put on a handout? How to organize it? Visual appeal? The one thing I would say is that a handout should function as a guide to the presentation and should be relatively short. I've been at professional talks where I've received a six-page handout, which is ridiculous.

    An initial thought is that much of what's said about visual aids (Google the phrase "visual aid checklist") seems also to apply to handouts.

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  2. I suppose the (or a) rule of writing that requires that you put yourself in the perspective of your audience would guide a handout as well.

    And they want to avoid the typical Bad Powerpoint Presentation problem, viz. the presenter just reading a bunch of text off a Powerpoint. Here's some perhaps interesting stuff on that.

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