I’ve given Rethinking the Presentation a hefty tweak. I have excised the end part, which was a discussion of what helpful stuff is around on the Internet and in books. It suddenly hit me that this information was a prime candidate for a document, rather than a wordy five minutes on the end of the video. Instead, I now have a slide with http://is.gd/2cMs written on it in a large font. This link, intended to be easy to write down, redirects to a web page with all that information on it.
I’m also considering making a new, quite short, presentation with it in. It just didn’t seem to fit where it was.
One thing feels a bit weird, though. The video has had about a hundred hits, and I know that some of those were people sending the link to each other, or otherwise recommending it. Now I have changed the thing that they recommended. There’s got to be at least a possibility that they would have a different opinion of it in its new form.
Do I have a moral obligation not to change things, once they are “out there”?
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What would be the moral obligation of not changing advice? Wouldn’t it be morally prudent instead to update it in a way that is more easily consumable?
Do what you like – it’s your baby – but if you make a substantive change it’s best to annotate it somewhere, so people know that something changed.
Law of least surprise trumps consistency, but not right of ownership.
ps: RTP page requires ability (or link) to allow comments/feedback.
Hm, you are right. It was originally envisioned as a resources page for people who had already watched the presentation at http://ian-d-smith.me.uk/08-2008/rethinking-the-presentation/
However, I just realised that that post will slowly vanish, leaving the resources page. Comments on “Pages” don’t seem to be supported in this template, so I’ll provide a link back to the original post.
Thanks for the heads up!
Nice presentation Ian! Let’s hope you’ve saved some lives!
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