Legal Communication - An Oxymoron?
There I was, just another one of my fast-n-furious Saturday nights surfing the web and blog hopping. Surfing the web can be a lot like thinking - you're here, it takes you there, it reminds you of this, now you're over there and suddenly you remember some random - whatever happened to that guy? - start Googling and the process starts all over again. Well that's what happened to me when I got sucked into a series of blogs and websites about the extremely specialized and well defined subject of "communication." As a trainer and presenter and considering I have a Masters degree in Corporate Communication and Technology, sometimes I think I have a clue - until I come across sites like the ones I'm going to share with you here about visual communication.
Visual communication. PowerPoint? Is that what you think of? Most of us probably start there. It's really all we have these days - as technology commoners. It came first and since there's really been little else. What else is there? Well as I pondered and clicked, I kept circling back to a Yale professor named Edward Tufte who once declared that "PowerPoint Is Evil." On his website/blog he asks "why presentations at all?" He offers a nationwide course called "Presenting Data and Information" which even covers courtroom exhibits. The class is only $360 and would be well worth your dollars if he's coming to a city near you (which he likely is).
Buyer Beware. Alex Halavais is a social architect who has this to say about how lawyers manage and present information and how "shallow" some of the companies that offer to help lawyers do just that appear to be.
Awesome Conference. From Mr. Halavais' site I learned about The Cardozo School
of Law's conference on "Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings" which is coming up next week in NYC. It's open to the public and free! If you are in the area - GO! I might even try to go as I'll be in NYC for LegalTech.
I also came across one of Harvard's "Teaching with Technology" pages - for professors. It has some interesting links that we can use including a paper by a Harvard prof titled "A Flexible Alternative to PowerPoint". If you are looking for alternatives to PowerPoint - here are some websites that try to offer just that:
If you don't mind PowerPoint and are looking for more insight on it, check out these sites:
