In reading Garr Reynold’s excellent Presentation Zen, I came across a great idea for webinars called Pecha-kucha. Apparently, Pecha-kucha (Japanese for chatter) was started in 2003 by Tokyo expatriate architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein as an alternative presentation format. Each speaker has 20 slides, each of which must be shown for 20 seconds, with which to tell their story or make their point. The slides advance automatically and so after 6 minutes and 40 seconds you’re done.
According to Reynolds, Pecha-kucha nights are now being held in over 80 cities around the world. I reckon a Pecha-kucha hour would work just great as the basis for a webinar.
Now all I’ve got to work out is how to pronounce it.
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You would have me sign up to Pecha-Kucha? Let it come, bring it on – wrapped or rapped; I won’t be rapt! I’m not yet ready to concede that I am part of a species which is, well, simply dumb.
Nick Carr’s provocative “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google, and Michael Bywater’s book “Big babies or Why can’t we just grow up?” http://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Babies-Cant-Just-Grow/dp/1862078831 make the point more eloquently than I. Bywater raises the question, “Are we throwing away two and a half millennia of Western civilisation, bit by bit, as our culture becomes more and more infantile?” Day by tweet-filled day, have we become more and more obsessed with the quick fix? We repudiate complexity, we reject sophistication, we abhor concentration. Wherever I turn I find myself drip-fed predigested pap. What used to pass for news in the press is now a dreary account of the latest A-list celebrity’s life or death. Even the bottles from which I drink water have rapidly evolved to resemble bay feeders with teats. I’m wrapped in cotton wool, protected from harm, held back from the dangers of living, or thinking. My learning is contained within safe circumscribed templates so it reaches me rapid; it may be wrapped or rapped but I won’t be rapt! I don’t care where it all began, I am not looking to apportion blame.
Let it be My Generation of Babyboomers, MTV, Disney, New Labour, Google, Wiki or the BBC;
All I know is that it feels painfully regressive. I’m sorry, Clive but my own personal slide back to infantilism has to stop somewhere.