Tip: Presenters Rejoice — A New Pages Feature for Faculty and Students

March 29, 2018

Back on October 18, 2017, I offered a tip on presenting with the iPad — creating a reading version of a speech/presentation in Pages that was formatted with a large enough font size to be easily read at a podium. I didn’t think it was rocket science then and don’t know.

With the latest release of Pages, however, the need to create a second copy is gone. Apple has programmed in Presenter Mode, which automatically resizes the font as I had described.

In addition, it switches (by default) to a dark mode, providing a high-contrast screen and reducing light for dimly lit rooms. It also has an autoscroll feature (with a modifiable scroll speed). The autoscroll starts and stops with a tap of the screen.

This is a really nice feature — one that will quietly make presenting much easier for iPad users (Thus far, I have not seen a parallel option appear in the MacOS version of Pages.). It also points to Apple’s method, as posited by Steve Jobs in an often quoted part of Walter Isaacson’s biography of him: “Some people say, ‘Give the customers what they want.’ But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!”' People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”[1]

[1] This idea is going to be central to my upcoming reaction to Apple’s Education event. If you want some homework in advance of that post, you should take a look at Bradley Chambers’ well reasoned and well written response on 9 to 5 Mac.

Dr. Matthew M. DeForrest is a Professor of English and the Mott University Professor at Johnson C. Smith University. The observations and opinions he expresses here are his own. You are very welcome to follow him on Twitter and can find his academic profile at Academia.edu.

An Always Engaged Audience

November 01, 2017

Some background: For those in other parts of the world who may not know, this fall has been unusually rough when it comes to the bugs that have been floating around here in North Carolina. Like most parents, my wife and I have a working arrangement — subject to change based on the needs of the day — as to who will stay home with our daughter when she has to stay home from school. Since we are both professors, this pattern generally aligns with the Monday-Wednesday-Friday (MWF)/Tuesday-Thursday (TR) split.

This semester, I have the MWF shift. This is counterintuitive, as my classes this semester are on MWF. She, however, has classes with more in-class assignments on MWF than I do. As a result, my MWF schedule is more open to alternate approaches.

I have been using Periscope to stream classes when I stay home. It is an imperfect vehicle for what I am attempting[1], but it gets the job done.

In a strange way, I have noticed that I find it a surprisingly comfortable experience to hold class via Periscope. And after class today, I think I have settled on why this is.

For those of you who have never taught, facing a room full of students can be a depressing task. I know that my students are more engaged than they look. Their questions and comments have, on more than one occasion, proved that just moments before I was about to succumb to despair. But if you know the semi-blank look that people assume when they watch television, you know what you will see looking out at a room full of students. Not all of them look like this, of course. Some are more animated and some are less. Nevertheless, there is a passive look that pervades the room. This can be true with the most engaged of students. If one is taking notes, for example, you do not get to see the animation in their face because they are looking down.[2]

When you broadcast on Periscope, you look at yourself. It is a feature that lets the broadcaster know what his audience is seeing. So, when I am talking about Mark Twain and H. G. Wells,[3] I am looking at someone who is actively engaged — not a classroom of students who are paying attention and trying to process what is being presented or discussed.[4]

I know that when I present, I feed off of those who are actively engaged. Most people in front of an audience do. When that is happening, I feel like I am doing a better job (Whether I am or not is a different question.). With Periscope, I provide myself with a positive feedback loop.

As a result, classroom performance, in the literal sense of the nature of what is presented rather than its content, could (Let me stress: could.) improve on the in-room experience with access to this technology, if it can be successfully linked to a mechanism for student participation, as discussed in footnote one below. It might also be worth considering and weighing for those running experiments with classroom delivery, as can be seen at Minerva University or through on-demand services like Kahn Academy.

[1] If you want to see what can be done with a streamed class that functions very much as an interactive seminar, I would highly recommend that you tune in to one of Signum University’s open classes. You will find me sitting in on “Exploring Lord of the Rings” most Tuesday evenings, beginning at roughly 9:30 PM Eastern. Professor Corey Olsen simultaneously broadcasts via Periscope/Twitter, Twitch, and Discord while being “present” in Lord of the Rings Online. The online version of Middle Earth allows for the classes to take field trips to locations of note every week. (The broadcasts are then made available on YouTube, as can be seen in this randomly chosen example.) He manages to juggle three chat areas (Discord is the primary location for the comments and questions.), where people ask questions and offer comments.

Since this blog is about the iPad in the educational space, I will let you know how I attend. I run Twitch (which contains the video and audio stream I use) and Discord (where I am present in the chat) in split screen mode on my 10.5” iPad Pro. I find it quicker to type my comments on the Smart Keyboard but often use the onscreen keyboard. To get a fuller picture and sound, I AirPlay the Twitch stream to my Apple TV. That, however, is a creature comfort and allows me to avoid resizing the split screen view to see more of the slides presented on the screen and/or type. It is possible to have a decent experience doing it all on the iPad.

[2] In case you are a student and are wondering, your professors can tell when you are writing about their class rather than another. The rhythm of your engagement in the class and the engagement with the page are either aligned or are not.

[3] Today’s 9AM class, which is on the way people understand time and how that is expressed in art and society, wrapped up A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and started The Time Machine.

[4] For those who might want to offer a well-meaning critique here and talk about active learning, let me offer a quick distinction: The look on a student’s face is a function of what they are doing rather than the pedagogical structure they are existing within. The same look will pervade on the faces of students during the kind of discussion or activity you might suggest I try. There is a material difference in the look worn by a student when they are “on” — when they have the floor or are talking — and when they are not, whether they are in a lecture or working in a small group. As a practical matter, it is impossible for everyone to be fully active at once. It is a question of how often they are fully active, how often they are partially active, how often they are passively active, and how often they are disengaged.

A Tip: Presenting with an iPad

October 18, 2017

About a year ago at a conference, someone looked at my iPad just before I got up to present a paper.[1] That what I was doing came as a surprise made me think I should pass this tip along to readers here.

This is a screen shot of the paper I recently submitted for the conference proceedings[2] of the Yeats Society of Korea's 2017 International Conference on W. B. Yeats and Movements in Literature, Art and Society in Seoul:

And here is what appeared on my screen while I presented.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to increase the font size on an electronic device. What it does require is for us to not loose sight of what we can do with a digital-first document. It is easy, after all, to get attached to the thought that the time of the presentation is tightly tied to its length.[3] But once the paper is completed (Well, as completed as any presentation draft gets....), we are free to change its appearance to suit our immediate needs.

The sharp eyed of you will notice that these are two separate files. I use a duplicate of the completed draft because it invariably needs editing to account for the fact that you can do things in writing that you cannot in speaking -- and visa-versa. Long sentences, for example, can be complex on the page or screen (see footnote one below) without risking losing a reader in a way that they cannot when a speaker encounters a listener.

Using a synched electronic copy also means I have a backup. If something goes wrong with my iPad, I can pull out my phone and access the file. It may not be as convenient but it sure beats having to try to receive your paper from memory.

Incidentally, this approach also works with paper printouts and on laptop screens. These methods have some drawbacks, of course. Printing in a larger font means more pages and an increased chance of the pages getting shuffled (I always make sure to have the page number formatted as "X of Y pages".) and laptops are more awkward while standing at a podium and it is not as easy to scroll through a document while presenting as it is on an iPad. These are, however, things that can easily be worked around if you haven't jumped on the iPad bandwagon.

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[1] For those outside of the humanities who may be more used to other methods of presenting (e.g., poster sessions), I generally give a 20 minute presentation when I attend a conference as part of a 90 minute long panel. Any time that remains after the three presentations (additional time is eaten up by introductions, people getting up and sitting down as one speaker makes way for the next, people running over their allotted time, and the like) is a Q & A and discussion period. Immediately following this, everyone rushes for the bathrooms and/or the coffee station.

[2] One of the nice things about the Yeats Society of Korea's conferences is that the proceedings (seen below, with a pen added for scale) come out before the conference and are distributed to the attendees for their use during the event. As such, we all have the papers in front of us and can make notes in them as we listen. This past year, we also received it electronically and I was able to use Goodnotes to annotate the document.

[3] For those who have not done this regularly, a twenty minute paper is roughly eight double spaced, 11-12 point pages long.