Before I want to take you through the five steps, which I outlined in my next to last post, I want to talk about the actual trigger that starts the whole process.
In Business, the Boss probably assigns his employee to prepare the numbers of the last quarter in a presentation. A speaker might be invited to a conference and she or he wants to prepare a presentation to guide the talk. A group of entrepreneurs might have to pitch their business idea to a board of venture capitalists. There are lots of reasons and incentives why we are making presentations, but I don't want to focus on this too much.
In University, a presentation - single or in a group - usually is an assigned task that might even be graded to a certain degree. I had a lot of assignments to do presentations. And there were many different approaches with different rules or limitations - which, by the way, apply to any kind of presentation.
Time:
There are a lot of opinions on how long a presentation should be. It has to be long enough to cover the required topics, but short enough that it fits into a given time slot. Guy Kawasaki - a venture capitalist - states that the time for a presentation must not exceed 20 minutes and TedTalks range around this time as well. Now you might not be an entrepreneur or Al Gore to give a presentation in either setting. In my opinion it should be relative to the content and sufficient to bring your message across.
Well this sounds very nice but how can it be applied?
A crucial thing is that the rules and guidelines set by the initiator have to be realistic and precise. A ten minute presentation about World War II or a forty minute presentation about the financial crisis seems unrealistic too me. Maybe for an overview but not for a detailed analysis. A twenty minute presentation about how a certain battle led to the end of the civil war in the US, with key factors and implications is better.
Make also sure, that there is enough time to prepare. This is however no excuse to procrastinate!
Format:
"Your task is to create a PowerPoint Presentation about ..." or even better: "with a maximum of 15 slides." Why does it always has to be PowerPoint? And in my opinion it should not matter how many slides you use, but I will come to that in later posts. PowerPoint seems to be THE tool for presentation creation. There are a lot of other ways to present content and messages. A car-salesman doesn't tie you down onto a chair and shows you a PowerPoint. For now I will leave it at that and encourage everybody to think outside the "PowerPoint-Box" and try to think about alternatives. I will point out a couple of methods in upcoming posts and also tackle the "slide-count" issue. My bottom line is "Freedom of Choice" as long as it is used effectively.
Topic:
My advice to students would be, to make sure what the task really is about. A presentation about the economy of greece would seem very broad and uninteresting. If it is stated as "Give a twenty minute presentation about the economy of greece", try to define your own topic and check with your teacher.
How about: "Present key factors, that lead to the current state of the greece economy as of 2012." The more a topic is defined, the easier it gets for the presenter to create an interesting and effective presentation. Maybe, even one key event is worth presenting about.
In my opinion, everybody is able to read a Wikipedia article about a broad topic such as the economy of greece. But the more detailed and defined the topic is, the easier it gets to target the research and to do an interesting presentation. In the end both the audience and the presenter will benefit.
In summary, when it comes to the ground rules:
1. Be sure to define the topic as good and precisely as possible.
2. Make sure that you have enough time to prepare
3. Relate content to given time
4. There is nothing wrong with PowerPoint* but try to think outside of the "PP-Box"
Comment about your experiences with great tasks and bad guidelines and rules. What are the trade-offs? What is the difficult part, when defining a topic for yourself?
*to be challenged at a later time - stay tuned ;-)
Monday, 30 January 2012
Monday, 23 January 2012
Why it is so important to teach "Presenting" in higher (business) education
From my experiences in business school, I can say that so many people - students and lecturers alike - don't know much about how to create and deliver effective and engaging presentations, that will make a difference and stay in students minds.
I think that the average retention rate from a lecture delivered with PowerPoint or other presentation software is too low. The only way retention is tested, is with a test or exam at the end of the course. But how much did the presentations of the topic contribute? How much did students take from the slides and print-outs they received? I think that too many information are lost just after the end of the presentation. I can only remember parts and messages of a few presentations and they were made by people who were able to tell compelling stories and did use examples and visuals instead of text-heavy slides.
I am not saying that self study and reading about a topic is not important, but in my opinion a lecture or presentation should at least add value to the learning experience and not be wasted time. By wasted time I mean that, students won't remember anything or too few information from a lecture presentation.
I state that it is essential that everybody should be taught how to present effectively.
Students look up to their lecturers and if they are confronted with bad and ineffective presentations and they don't even realize it, they are heading for big trouble down the road.
Especially business students will depend on good communication and presentation skills in their later profession. I suppose these skills are important for anybody pursuing a higher education degree. So many other students have a passion or finding they want and need to talk to a larger audience about. Why should anybody not to be able to be understood?
This is why presenting is so important for anybody.
With Visu Presentations I want to provide this education. I am creating screencasts and video courses covering the presentation creation process I talked about last week. Furthermore I want to feature some presentation software tips and workflows. I will keep on blogging and tweeting my thoughts and tips I find through my research to help anybody to become a better presenter.
I think that the average retention rate from a lecture delivered with PowerPoint or other presentation software is too low. The only way retention is tested, is with a test or exam at the end of the course. But how much did the presentations of the topic contribute? How much did students take from the slides and print-outs they received? I think that too many information are lost just after the end of the presentation. I can only remember parts and messages of a few presentations and they were made by people who were able to tell compelling stories and did use examples and visuals instead of text-heavy slides.
I am not saying that self study and reading about a topic is not important, but in my opinion a lecture or presentation should at least add value to the learning experience and not be wasted time. By wasted time I mean that, students won't remember anything or too few information from a lecture presentation.
I state that it is essential that everybody should be taught how to present effectively.
Students look up to their lecturers and if they are confronted with bad and ineffective presentations and they don't even realize it, they are heading for big trouble down the road.
Especially business students will depend on good communication and presentation skills in their later profession. I suppose these skills are important for anybody pursuing a higher education degree. So many other students have a passion or finding they want and need to talk to a larger audience about. Why should anybody not to be able to be understood?
This is why presenting is so important for anybody.
With Visu Presentations I want to provide this education. I am creating screencasts and video courses covering the presentation creation process I talked about last week. Furthermore I want to feature some presentation software tips and workflows. I will keep on blogging and tweeting my thoughts and tips I find through my research to help anybody to become a better presenter.
Monday, 16 January 2012
Reflection and outlook
Just before Christmas we had to perform a presentation in our English class about a pretty broad defined subject and had to apply it to a context where an international company was planning to do business in the UK. Basically it was a business briefing about the implications each topic had on the company entering the british market.
Although the overall task seemed a little bit confusing at first, it was a pretty straight forward one. Anyway the presentations where taped and I hope we will get the footage to analyse ourselves. As you might already know from my tweets, we had to write a reflection about the presentation process and I promised to feature some of mine with you today.
So here we go:
[...]
The essence is this:
It depends on how you break it down but I think, there are five different stages to a presentation: Preparation -> Research -> Design -> Delivery -> Evaluation. In following blogposts, I will elaborate on each of those steps, defining them more clearly.
Even for myself I see a lot of room for improvement in all of those steps, but it is important to know what a successful presentation contains.
So with this blog and later some video-courses and other content, I want to examine these steps and stages. Make students (myself included) and others aware of these steps. But the most crucial thing to the whole concept is execution.
Everybody, especially every student, probably knows how to write a "killer-essay" or a great report. We know how to proofread and spell check, do effective research, but it all comes down to execution. To go through with it, not to procrastinate and deliver only a decent essay, because "we did not have the time after all".
So stay put, comment on my posts, as I am exploring the different steps during the next months. Suggest alternatives to the methods I propose. Criticize anything that does not suit you and share the parts you value and want others to know as well.
My goal is to overall raising the bar for presentations made in university and later in our day-to-day life.
Although the overall task seemed a little bit confusing at first, it was a pretty straight forward one. Anyway the presentations where taped and I hope we will get the footage to analyse ourselves. As you might already know from my tweets, we had to write a reflection about the presentation process and I promised to feature some of mine with you today.
So here we go:
[...]
I was excited to prepare the presentation for this class at first. I had numerous thoughts going through my mind. Despite the enthusiasm, my group quickly encountered problems. “How to narrow down a broadly defined topic to fit into a twenty-minute presentations and applying it to a business context?” We started too quickly and found out great things about our topic, but could not relate it to a business venture at all. Another more systematic brainstorming session resolved this, and we could refocus and again do more targeted research. We constantly needed to ask ourselves: “Okay, this is really interesting, but is it relevant for a company doing business in Britain?” There was a lot of restructuring and “crossing-out”, but we made considerable progress as we came closer to the deadline. Another problem I personally encountered was, that our brainstorming appeared already in PowerPoint. I did research myself about effective presenting and presentation design, but was not able to convince my team without proving with viable sources. It left me very frustrated, but I will talk about the outcome at the end.
[...]
What I learned from other presenters is mostly the following: Know your topic and know your technology! I personally hate to rely on other people’s hardware and software and would rather bring everybody to my room with my equipment. Joking aside, PowerPoint can be a powerful tool, if it is understood correctly and used effectively. For example, importing a video is somewhat more advanced, but if you want to include it, you have to make sure it works correctly and does not interrupt a smooth flow of a presentation. I am influenced by many people about slide design, such as Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds. Presentations should be visual and text is not, although most presentations were featured by bullet points and text. Most importantly though, it is to know your topic well. One has to be familiar and almost an expert in his field. Even if someone has trouble with public speaking, everyone can distinguish between someone who knows his part and is insecure and someone who doesn’t know what he is supposed to talk about.
[...]
The essence is this:
It depends on how you break it down but I think, there are five different stages to a presentation: Preparation -> Research -> Design -> Delivery -> Evaluation. In following blogposts, I will elaborate on each of those steps, defining them more clearly.
Even for myself I see a lot of room for improvement in all of those steps, but it is important to know what a successful presentation contains.
So with this blog and later some video-courses and other content, I want to examine these steps and stages. Make students (myself included) and others aware of these steps. But the most crucial thing to the whole concept is execution.
Everybody, especially every student, probably knows how to write a "killer-essay" or a great report. We know how to proofread and spell check, do effective research, but it all comes down to execution. To go through with it, not to procrastinate and deliver only a decent essay, because "we did not have the time after all".
So stay put, comment on my posts, as I am exploring the different steps during the next months. Suggest alternatives to the methods I propose. Criticize anything that does not suit you and share the parts you value and want others to know as well.
My goal is to overall raising the bar for presentations made in university and later in our day-to-day life.
Monday, 9 January 2012
Why I started Visu Presentations?
I am currently preparing for upcoming exams and was reviewing "printouts of lecture-slides" the last couple of days (some people call it "handout" or "script", but I will point out in later posts why I prefer the term "print-out" instead of "handout"). It came all back to me, why I started this endeavor I call Visu Presentations.
Someday I might look back and will thank my lecturers for the incentives they gave me to start blogging, tweeting and - soon! - creating content about a subject I like. Right now, I am not amused. It seems like they don't really care about delivering their favorite subject effectively to me and of course to my fellow students. I remembered why I stopped attending these lectures half way through term and started studying in my flat instead. Not because they were held at 6pm - an unfortunate time but still manageable. No, these lecturers, with all due respect to their field and expertise in it - did not seem to know how to deliver a engaging, effective, enlightening, engrossing and enthralling presentation or talk about their topic, their field. I certainly hope not, that they were not motivated enough. But, were they content with their own performance? I don't know.
Anyway, five times I strolled into the auditorium and was welcomed by two large screens, each displaying the first slide of yet another dull presentation - at first confusing for me, but I hoped that at least someone had put some thought into it and one screen wasn't enough.
So why were these presentations dull? Was I the only one, who though that way? Thankfully, no. We were presented with slides overloaded with text, bullet points and clip art. Worse still, sometimes the presenter was reading completely off the slides making the whole PowerPoint - at least for me - superfluous. During one lecture, I tried to only listen to the lecturer; another time, just focussing on the slides and essentially reading them like a book. Although, when one lecturer started to put multiple thoughts or points into one bullet point and separating them with semicolons and reading the whole presentation off the screen in a monotone voice, making it impossible to follow, I decided to go.
It struck me the same day, that I did not want to accept this and help anybody, who has problems with presentations. May it be the right use of the software, the final delivery, or the process as a whole. Teachers and lecturers are role models for students and in following presentations by us students that semester, I recognized certain attitudes: If they do it like this, it must be good enough for us to do it also. In team meetings preparing several presentations I realized how entangled we all were by the "black magic of PowerPoint".
Here were are at a point were I want to raise the attention of everyone, who thinks the ways of presenting I described above are sufficient and good. They are not and there are many people who agree with me on that (from what I found in my research about presentations creation and design).
Of course, there are lectures with great presentations and talks. I was fortunate enough to attend a couple. And to me, they prove to be more effective and retentive than the hails of bullet points some lectures expose their students to, everyday.
But what is different with these presentations? I will elaborate on the answers to that question in great detail and to an extent, where anybody will - hopefully - be able to present effectively to any audience.
Please keep coming back weekly reading this blog and exploring ways of effective presentation creation. I am positive that I will manage to keep posting weekly on Mondays throughout the upcoming exam period. So please keep reading, sharing and commenting. Maybe you have similar experiences or totally different ones in any way.
Have a great and fulfilling week.
Someday I might look back and will thank my lecturers for the incentives they gave me to start blogging, tweeting and - soon! - creating content about a subject I like. Right now, I am not amused. It seems like they don't really care about delivering their favorite subject effectively to me and of course to my fellow students. I remembered why I stopped attending these lectures half way through term and started studying in my flat instead. Not because they were held at 6pm - an unfortunate time but still manageable. No, these lecturers, with all due respect to their field and expertise in it - did not seem to know how to deliver a engaging, effective, enlightening, engrossing and enthralling presentation or talk about their topic, their field. I certainly hope not, that they were not motivated enough. But, were they content with their own performance? I don't know.
Anyway, five times I strolled into the auditorium and was welcomed by two large screens, each displaying the first slide of yet another dull presentation - at first confusing for me, but I hoped that at least someone had put some thought into it and one screen wasn't enough.
So why were these presentations dull? Was I the only one, who though that way? Thankfully, no. We were presented with slides overloaded with text, bullet points and clip art. Worse still, sometimes the presenter was reading completely off the slides making the whole PowerPoint - at least for me - superfluous. During one lecture, I tried to only listen to the lecturer; another time, just focussing on the slides and essentially reading them like a book. Although, when one lecturer started to put multiple thoughts or points into one bullet point and separating them with semicolons and reading the whole presentation off the screen in a monotone voice, making it impossible to follow, I decided to go.
It struck me the same day, that I did not want to accept this and help anybody, who has problems with presentations. May it be the right use of the software, the final delivery, or the process as a whole. Teachers and lecturers are role models for students and in following presentations by us students that semester, I recognized certain attitudes: If they do it like this, it must be good enough for us to do it also. In team meetings preparing several presentations I realized how entangled we all were by the "black magic of PowerPoint".
Here were are at a point were I want to raise the attention of everyone, who thinks the ways of presenting I described above are sufficient and good. They are not and there are many people who agree with me on that (from what I found in my research about presentations creation and design).
Of course, there are lectures with great presentations and talks. I was fortunate enough to attend a couple. And to me, they prove to be more effective and retentive than the hails of bullet points some lectures expose their students to, everyday.
But what is different with these presentations? I will elaborate on the answers to that question in great detail and to an extent, where anybody will - hopefully - be able to present effectively to any audience.
Please keep coming back weekly reading this blog and exploring ways of effective presentation creation. I am positive that I will manage to keep posting weekly on Mondays throughout the upcoming exam period. So please keep reading, sharing and commenting. Maybe you have similar experiences or totally different ones in any way.
Have a great and fulfilling week.
Monday, 2 January 2012
Happy New Year and welcome to the visu-presentations blog
I am excited to start 2012 with a blog about a passion of mine.
Presentations.
Don't get me wrong, this blog is not intended to be another "Bad-PowerPoint Blog", but rather a holistic approach to presentations from the beginning steps of preparation to the final delivery. Using presentation-software effectively will be a part as well, but not the focus.
As I am a student at a Business School, I will focus on presentations in university and business contexts, but my methods , tips and research findings can be applied to all sorts of presentations. Students, lecturers and teachers, businesswomen and men, entrepreneurs and anybody who wants to talk about something important to a relevant audience.
Via this blog I want to share my knowledge, experience and research findings all around effective and engaging presentation creation.
I will try to write at least once per week, so stay tuned, keep reading and referring to this blog, if you like it. I welcome all comments, but please don't spam with unnecessary and irrelevant jibber-jabber.
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