29 Feb 2008
12 Tools for Transition. No.1: The Self-Teaching Peak Oil Talk.
In The Transition Handbook you will find 12 “Tools for Transition”, scattered through the book, practical activities that can help to support and deepen your Transition process. Some of them have evolved during the process, and others are other peoples’ ideas we have used and sometimes adapted. I’ll post them here, one a day. This first one is the shortest, but hopefully you might find a way to use it in your work.
The Self-Teaching Peak Oil Talk.
There are two ways one can deliver a peak oil presentation. The first is to stand up in front of a group of people and speak. The second is to get the group to give itself the presentation. How so, when they now nothing about it you might ask? Aha! This is where the Self-Teaching Peak Oil Talk comes in. Simply print a good peak oil powerpoint (the Transition Network is producing a generic one which is a good place to start) onto A3 or A4 sheets, and on the back of each sheet put some text (short and to the point) which explains the slide.
Then distribute the cards among the participants and, like guests at a party, invite them to mingle and to tell each other the information on their ‘slides’. As well as being a fun way to start getting people familiar with peak oil issues, it is also a great ice-breaker at an event or at the beginning of a course.
Nadia Hillman
29 Feb 10:45pm
I remember this technique from the Transition Training we did here in Bristol. Speaking as a person who has had many a nice nap during a peak oil presentation, this kind of interactive learning keeps me focused-and awake! Try it!
Lucy Skywalker
4 Mar 8:48am
Brilliant! I’ve just been wondering how we are going to learn to speak like you can speak Rob – if we’ve come fairly recently to Transition, can’t afford an expensive training but still care passionately, still sense the urgency, want to get the word out, and want to lighten your load too.
I now plan to use this when we organize our own “speaking up” workshop.
Peter Barber
5 Mar 1:29pm
I imagine that this only works properly as participatory method if everyone has some information on their ‘slide’ to tell the group, so if there are more people than slides then there might be problems.
Has anyone tried handing out more than one copy of each slide in larger groups to make sure everyone has something? Does it work?
And does it help if people know where their slide would come in a conventional presentation, or is that too linear?!