Specially In This New Age Of Webinars, Presentation Must Lead To Communication!


Webinars here, webinars there: The institutional as well as individual excitements are on! when it comes to appearing online as a guest lecturer or speaker in a special webcast. Good – and Bad.

Above image shows one of the photo albums included in “UPLB Today” Facebook page (shared by NJ Anastacio). Readable entries are “CBSUA Academic Affairs And Policy Summit 2021” and “University of the Philippines Los Baños added 18 new photos to the album #UPLB Today.” CBSUA is the Central Bicol State University located in San Jose, Pili, Camarines Sur, Southern Luzon.

Exactly! What is the CBSUA image doing in a UPLB Facebook page is not explicit – notimplicit either. #UPLB Today has quite a number of those albums – each one without title and without description. Someone slipping on the job.

The above cluttered image reflects what I call “This New Age Of Webinars” – good for personal exposure, not-so-good for science or knowledge gained being transferred from one person to many – because there is hardly any attempt to communicate, that is, to make the non-technical people understand “scientific language.”

Like: A technical presentation via PowerPoint is made – but there is no effort of the presenter to translate the knowledge into something memorable, something familiar.

Apropos to this, let me tell you I am a UPLB alumnus, BSA Ag Edu ’65, a teacher with a Civil Service Professional license. Which should imply my double interests in studying and teaching. Sometime in 1980, I invented what I called “Communication for Development (ComDev),” which was intentionally my personal statement on the value of UPLB Professor Nora Quebral’s concept of “Development Communication(DevCom).” While ComDev is explicit communication to promote the development of villages; DevCom does not mention development as an aim.

Professor Nora’s DevCom is “science presentation” – that’s all. That phrase in quotes precisely describes the webinars here and there in the Philippines: Roughly, each webinar is 90% Presentation, 10% Communication. 90% to impress, 10% to express.

Clearly, to me a digital writer (blogger) and editor (desktop publisher) in the last 34 years, since 1987, current presentations for PH webinars must be rewritten & edited to be 90% popular and 10% technical in language.

So now let me ask: In those PH webinars, what are experts and/or resource persons communicating? Their acquired sets of knowledge and/or their specialties in any of the sciences. Now, who remembers what is being said in any of those webinars? My generous guess is 10 among 100 – and then again, vaguely. Why because those presenters of papers and/or new knowledge have not been priorly made conscious of the need for less presentation in technical language, and more communication in popular language.

So today, webinars are good for presenters, not learners!

If you want to graduate from presentation of science or knowledge to communication, without paying for an editor, you can get ideas simply reading my blog:

BraveNewWorld@PH
(bravenewworldph.blogspot.com)

Sorry to say: Today’s reality with PH webinars is that they are 90% Presentation and only 10% Communication. It should be the other way around.@517

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