Lesson plan about visualization and presentation for advanced business English students

A TED lecture by David McCandless (18 minutes) is the basis for this lesson with advanced business English students.

Goals:

1: the students will consider the power of visualizing data
2: the students will raise their awareness of presentation technology
3: (if applicable) the students will decide on a new medium for their next presentation

Lead-in

Students discuss visuals they used in the first presentation they ever gave (overhead slides, etc.)
Students describe visuals they used in their most recent presentation (PowerPoint?)
If students have not presented, they can compare older and more recent presentations they have attended.

History

Students and teacher together build up a time-line of presentation visuals

• Teacher's notes here:
• 50's-60's: overhead projector and slides (actually 1940 - 3M company, transparencies)
• 50's: slide projector (ITA, used for home trials, Kodak)
• 60's-70's: mind maps, Tony Buzan (Porphyry 3AD)
• 1980's: PowerPoint, developed by Apple employee Rob Campbell
• 1986: Harvard Graphics - DOS - MS Windows based
• 90's: Wordle/tag clouds - Flickr/Delicious/Technorati
• 2007: Prezi, developed by two Hungarians, an architect and a software developer
• !7500 B.C.: the first Infographic? cave painting of Lescaux, France - data of a hunt
• Information design is the creation of infographics
• Richard Saul Wurman, founder of TED, coined the title information architect

This video can be used in small segments, because the presenter, David McCandless, shows the following graphics separately. You could just use one or two of his graphics instead of watching the whole video.

Topics of the graphics:

1. How billions of dollars are spent by countries
2. Fear generated by the media
3. Broken romances
4. Human senses
5. Military budgets
6. Health and food supplements
7. The political spectrum
8. The Iceland volcano

Vocabulary/Lexis

Students can listen and tick the expressions they hear. Alternately, teacher can point out some expressions for discussion. Students could implement the expressions in role plays or homework tasks.

info overload

data glut

failing that...

scrape (as an IT expression meaning to collect data from various sources)

profiteering

mushroom to...

mountains out of molehills

saturation

lack of transparency

millenium bug

data detective

ubiquitous

milking a metaphor

convey something to somebody

poured into our eyes

bandwidth

exquisitely sensitive

warmongering

efficacy

spawning

left-leaning

lopsided

carbon-neutral

Discussion

• Discussion can go on during or after viewing of the various segments. Focus on both the points made and the way they are delivered visually.
• Invite the students to choose an alternate method for their next presentation (retro to overhead projector or whiteboard! or ultramodern Prezi?)
• Hold a debate using the rubric: "Information architects manipulate our views for their own purposes." Agree or disagree?

What's next

Students bring in infographics from their company or industry and discuss how well they help visualize the data.

Students recast one of their previous PowerPoint presentations with different technology and present it. Discuss the relative impact.

Lascaux caves, prehistoric paintings: the first infographic?