Striped:Shirt

When we arrived at Frujch for Pecha Kucha, you can sense a totally different atmosphere than usual. Frujch was filled with professionals from the creative industry (and there were a few students like me). Before the presentations even started, you can already sense their creativity through the chatter, their outfits and of course the plastic eye-glasses with the funky hair.

Overall, the presentations that night were entertaining (except for a couple) and informative. My favorite from the night was the presentation by Graham Perkins, a consultant, who talked about creativity and the education system. He presented first about a topic that was relevant to the audience. More importantly, he was the only one that stuck to the 20X20 format of Pecha Kucha. Like the way it should be done, he timed his slides to transition every 20 seconds and he adapted what he was going to say to that constraint. I was impressed with the design of his slides so I went to Google him and found out that his career was surrounded with creativity from Adobe down to MTV Asia. Kudos to Graham for presenting Pecha Kucha the right way.

HJGHER somewhat followed the 20×20 format but I’m not sure if each slide lasted 20 seconds. I’ve to review that from the video that I took. They presented a well-written short story accompanied by photographs which made it look like a semi-short film. It was probably my second favorite and it was a nice way to end the night as they presented last.

Andrew Lo from MTV Asia was the most entertaining that night because of his personality and his courage to present the reasons why he hates MTV. Although I think that he should have stopped after his last point and chose not to present about MTV’s campaigns because it completely went off topic and he kinda lost the audience then. (Oh yeah! When I first saw this guy, I thought he looked really familiar. Found out later that he was the guy behind the Spot the VJ campaign which I saw the making of on TV.)

Steve Lawler’s (not the DJ) was visually stimulating. He’s a very talented guy and it was nice to learn about the inspirations behind his work. He fascination with Stanley Kubrick is something worth remembering.

The rest of the presentations were just alright. I felt that they were presenting too much about themselves and their work. Even though Pecha Kucha Nights let you present on any topic, it would be nice to watch a presentation and learn something new. Not something that we can just read off the About page on their website. This is why Graham Perkins was the best of the night: everyone in the audience listened to “ideas worth spreading”. (His presentations reminded me of TED Talks, which he made several references to.)

To sum it up, the first Pecha Kucha Night Singapore was a success! Can’t wait for the next one. I’ve got all the presentations on this Kyte channel. Enjoy!

After my presentation the other day on microblogging, I was inspired to conduct a social media experiment using Twitter. SMU is proud to be a technology-enabled university and I’m going to try to add microblogging to the current technologies being used in school. I’m sure there are already a group of students using Twitter but I’m just not sure how small or how big the group is.

So if you’re a student or an alumni of The Singapore Management University and you are on Twitter, please do follow @SMUtweets on Twitter. (If you don’t have an account but want to be part of this experiment, please do sign up and join the fun!)

Other than sending alerts to SMU students, SMUtweets aims to help students develop “a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space” as suggested by academHacK. It can also be an Emergency Notification System like what the University of Michigan is doing with Twitter. I doubt that we’ll have emergencies like what happened in Virginia Tech but an example of an SMU emergency announcement would be: “All group study room’s in business block are fully booked for the week. Try again next week.”

About a month ago, Andrew Careaga posed this question on his blog, “Should universities tweet?” My answer to that is there is no harm in trying. The corp comm office in SMU will not start Twittering anytime soon, so I’ll try to initiate something before I end university schooling in a month.

I’m not sure how this experiment will turnout or evolve.. We’ll just have to tweet and see..

Last Saturday was probably one of the last times in school that I am able to present slides wherein the design fits perfectly with the content and the course (Social Media). Our group presented on microblogging, the tools and its business application for communication professionals.

I designed the slides to look like one of the microblogging platforms, Pownce, for two reasons.

1. Pownce’s UI looks the best out of all microblogging services online mainly due to its designer, Daniel Burka, who I think is also responsible for Digg.com’s user interface/experience. He’s the man!
2. Also, the brevity of microblogging is inline with the way I usually design my slides - very clean and simple with minimal words as possible.

I’m glad that my group mates were able to pull it off and present really well, even though they were new to this style of presenting. In a way, it helped them understand the content better for them to present without using any script. One of my group mates was even singled-out by our professor saying how each SMU student should be presenting like her. Well done, Adelyn!

Anyway, here are the slides without the video interview by Robert Scoble with the co-founders of Jaiku:

One thing that I’ve learned this time is to rehearse as much as I can before presentation day. I went in there last Saturday with minimal rehearsal and once again fumbled through my parts.

’till next time…

My Filipino friends and I shoot hoops every Sunday at school to destress. The last Sunday that we played, I decided to take a video of some of the plays and passed it over to Kevin for editing (on his newly purchased MacBook Pro). Check it out:

(I have not posted much since I got back from the trip since I am still on a holiday mood. All my online activity has stopped - I think I have around 2000+ unread RSS feeds. Should I hit the “Mark All as Read” button or should I not?)

I’m a big fan of this guy.

Once again, he impresses us with his sheer genius and style with his thoughts on the US primaries. I like the the quality of his arguments and how he slowly builds them up logically. Take your time and listen to The Lessig in the videos below.

“20 or so minutes on why I am 4Barack”

“10 minutes on whether Hillary can win”

In tomorrow’s social media class, our professor will be showing everyone Larry’s presentation on creativity and the law with relation to the Read/Write web from TED. I can’t wait to see everyone’s faces during and after the presentation as they watch in awe. I’ve done this kind of presentation twice already in the past 2 years and 1 worked out better than the other. Last term, someone told me that a group or two already did it during advertising class. I’m sure, after tomorrow’s class, more SMU students will be presenting using The Lessig Style.

It ain’t easy. But once the students pull it off, they will have a presentation that will stick.

Thank you Mr. Lessig for being an inspiration.

Check out this video by Vincent, who’s an undergrad like me in the Singapore Management University. It’s a video to support Singapore’s bid to host the Youth Olympic Games in 2010.

Isn’t that cool? I first saw one of his videos a couple of years ago for a school project and I was really impressed. It was amateurishly-professionally done, if that makes any sense. I’ve been a fan of his ever since.

Vincent’s productions are way better than what I see on local TV. He’s got the right angle, music and style for every video that he shoots and produces.

I can’t wait to see him do bigger projects.

In Social Media class today, Michael Netzley recommended a blog of a fellow classmate. Without hesitation, I googled ‘daryl smube’. Daryl is his name and I figured that he belonged to SMUBE based from his name card. Voila! His blog, Unique-Frequency, was right up there. In short, his blog focuses on media.

Daryl’s blog is now subscribed under my Google reader because after skimming through his entries, I found that we have similar interests: marketing, Godin, TED, web 2.0, etc. Better yet, he’s in the same school and class as me. As Michael likes to put it, this is an excellent example of “People Like Me”.

Based from his personal blog, I think that Daryl has been on the blogosphere for quite some time now. What he has done since early last year was to focus on a single topic: media. That’s smart because more people like me will start reading his blog as we find it useful and interesting.

With more than 20 entries in less than a month, there’s always something to look forward to in Unique-Frequency. Keep it up, Daryl.

I haven’t had the time to write an entry since the new year (actually, I haven’t done much) because I did not get all the required courses for my last term of school. Not getting these courses would mean that I’d be spending another term in school (if I get my courses then). There was so much pressure from both my parents and my girlfriend that I kinda hate BOSS now. So for the system administrator or whoever is in-charge of BOSS, here are a few recommendations:

1.  Give graduating students a separate window to bid: It’s our last term in school and we probably are trying to bid for courses to fulfill our degree. To avoid students knocking at the registrar’s office during the second week of the term, just give us a chance to bid for the courses we need to graduate. We surely cannot compete with exchange students who have 500 e-dollars. Having our own window to bid will ensure a fair bidding system between us graduates without having to compete with lower batches and the exchange students.

2 . Increase class size or add another instance of the course: I’m sure the administrators maintaining BOSS can view how many bidders are there for a course. If you see a lot more students bidding for a course exceeding its maximum number of seats, please follow recommendation number two. For Michael Netzley’s Social Media class, there were 20 people bidding for 2 seats. What do  you expect the other 18 to do? I understand that this does not apply to all courses. This course in particular is just really popular. However, I think if there is high demand, they should at least increase the number of seats to accomodate students who are really interested in the course. Better yet, put up another class if the professor allows.

3. Take the students’ degree into consideration: Our school registrars always say that there are other courses to bid for just in case we don’t get our first choice. That’s fine until there are no other courses that are related to my degree. Why in the world would an Information Systems and Marketing student study the Philosophy of Social Science or other law courses? I don’t mind studying general courses such as language and basic economics courses. Just do not force us to take something that won’t help our career.

I hope your listening. It’s going to get worse once SMU reaches its maximum student population.

For the most awaited presentation of the term, I tried to do a little something extra and use the Lessig method to present. I did it once before but that was rehearsed at least 3 weeks before the presentation. For the presentation the other day, I had 3 hours. And it wasn’t as smooth as I wanted it to be.

Our professor emailed our group the day after:

Your presentation was well done overall and you received an ‘A’. The content was solid and the presentation style was good (a few minor hiccups that interrupted the flow, but fine overall).

Minor hiccups - my part!

Other than that, I am proud of my group and I really enjoyed working with them.

Here’s a very impressive presentation by the man himself, Larry Lessig. A must see!