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...Home ... Editorial ... Columns ..Column Story Saturday: April 5, 2014


 Dulaney on Certs  
Emmett Dulaney
Emmett Dulaney


 Goodbye, BrainShare
Plus, Cisco adds a CCIE Wireless exam, and Book of the Week pushes presentations beyond PowerPoint.
by Emmett Dulaney  
1/7/2009 -- After more than 20 years, one of the first and most enduring vendor-specific conferences is closing its doors. In a letter to customers and partners, John Dragoon, Novell's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, announced that BrainShare 2009 has been cancelled.

Though the conference was always as surrounded by marketing hype as others, it also was one of the best venues for training and certification-related information from Novell. With Novell's push in recent years to promote Linux, BrainShare was a great opportunity to learn about new developments and hear about future plans for SUSE.

In the letter, Dragoon assured that Novell will "continue to focus on building the high-quality training and enablement offerings you have come to expect from us. We will do this through online classes, virtual conferences and local tours. These new approaches will allow everyone to participate in our education and training -- without incurring the high cost of travel that, at least for now, is an issue for many of you."

Cisco Adds CCIE Wireless Exam
Last summer, a commissioned study by Forrester identified a need for "candidates who can design, deploy, manage and troubleshoot wireless networks (WLANs)." To that end, Cisco has created a CCIE certification in Wireless Networking.

The written exam (350-050) was beta-tested during October and November and is now slated to go live in February. Available through VUE testing centers, the exam will consist of between 90 and 110 questions that must be answered within 120 minutes.

A blueprint of the exam topics that can be found here. A blueprint of topics for the eight-hour lab portion of the certification can be found here.

Book of the Week: 'slide:ology'
There may have once been a day when those in technology were comfortable working with computers and avoiding human contact. But if such a day had ever existed, it's certainly long gone. Today's environment not only requires meeting with people, but regularly making presentations on everything from how to use a technology to how much money is needed in next year's budget. Of course, the problem with so many presentations today is that they're just plain bad.

Enter slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. Written by Nancy Duarte, the principal of Duarte Design (incidentally, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"), this book is focused on providing ways for you to think beyond the standard PowerPoint bullet list. This isn't a tutorial that walks you through the steps of creating a presentation; it's an exploration of what you're trying to accomplish with the presentation. In other words, it provides the starting point, then leaves it to you to choose the tools.

Case studies of great presenters appear in the book, and there are enough examples throughout that you'll be sure to walk away with plenty of ideas of things to do before you begin creating your next slide. The final chapter, if you can call it that, is a manifesto of the five theses of the power of a presentation. The third of these is my favorite, and -- in my opinion -- says it all:

"Help Them See What You're Saying: Epiphanies and profoundly moving experiences come from moments of clarity. Think like a designer and guide your audience through ideas in a way that helps, not hinders, their comprehension. Appeal not only to their verbal senses, but to their visual senses as well." 


Emmett Dulaney is the author of several books on Linux, Unix and certification. He can be reached at .

 


More articles by Emmett Dulaney:

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