| If you've learned nothing else from me throughout this book, hopefully you've remembered my complaining about how too much paper is wasted by presenters who insist on providing printed handouts of their slides. With the Web, you now have a paperless method of making slides available. Consider these situations, for example: Prior to an important meeting of the board of directors, you post a barebones version of your presentation, including key questions and information. At the meeting, you build on what board members have already thought about, fleshing out the presentation with additional slides and discussion. You've concluded a terrific speech to your professional organization, and several people ask if they can get copies of your slides because they missed writing down several key details. You provide them with a Web address and invite them to view the slide show there. You make a slide show available to students the day before class so that those who want to can print slides to use as an outline on which they can take indepth class notes. You present the findings of your research at a conference, but the audience is relatively small. You want to disseminate your work more widely, so you post your presentation on the Web, along with links to your bibliographies, data, and so on.
As you can see, the Web can be a great way to make your work available to nearly anyone, quickly and cheaply. Along with this tremendously liberating ability to publish come some serious, and perhaps limiting, responsibilities. Here are some examples: What you publish becomes publicly available unless you take specific steps to restrict access to it. Further, automatic indexing programs constantly search the Web for Web pages just like yours and add content indexing to their search engines. Programs such as Google, Yahoo!, and Lycos can make it easy for anyone to find your work, even if you don't want them to. Information you present on the Web doesn't have the benefit of your presence to answer questions. What you publish might be interpreted incorrectly or taken out of context. Material that you use in face-to-face teaching might be legal under the fair-use provisions of the copyright law, but publishing the same material publicly on the Web might infringe on someone else's copyright. Some teachers wonder if students will bother to attend class if they make notes available on the Web. Depending on how effective you are in the classroom, this might or might not be a problem. You have control over the type of computer and hardware you use when you make a presentation, but you can't control what your Web viewers use. For example, if you use large video clips, will those who have only dial-up access to the Web be able to view them?
Despite these caveats, publishing a presentation to the Web offers so many advantages that you'd really be missing out if you didn't learn how to do it. Besides, with PowerPoint, publishing to the Web is easier than you could ever imagine. |
