Death by Powerpoint: Bullets don’t kill people, presenters do July 8, 2008
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Like most presenters, I use slideware and templates to help me produce my presentations. Or at least that’s what I thought. On reflection, what I’ve actually been doing is using slideware and templates to help me produce speakers notes. I really should have known better, but PowerPoint just makes it so easy to create bulleted lists that I never really considered another approach - until now…
As part of my research for a presentation skills workshop I’m putting together, I’ve been reading a lot about presentation design. A key theme for nearly all commentators is that slides should be more visual and less cluttered with text, bullets and logos. At first, I thought this was a case of style over substance, but having tried this approach I’ve realised it has a far more significant effect on my presentations.
Before going anywhere near my slideware, I spent more time than usual thinking about the key message I wanted to communicate and how best way to explain it. Garr Reynolds calls this ‘Going Analog’ and I think it’s a great way to keep planning separate from development. Rather than thinking in bullets, I find this helps me think in pictures and stories which help in creating a visual presentation.
Next I fired up Powerpoint for the development, but ditched the template. Now when I click File > New, I get a blank slide, not something that immediately constrains my creativity. Some may argue that the branding and consistency templates bring are important, but I’d say giving a good presentation is the best marketing and templates don’t help with that.
Having done the analogue planning, putting the slidedeck together was pretty simple. Each slide was an full-screen image overlaid with a just few key words or a quote. But this is not just about making slides that look nice. For me, these kind of slides enhance the message and make it more memorable. They also encourage the presenter to do what he’s really there to do - to present. Instead of being tied to the script of a bulleted list, these slides provide a backdrop to a performance in which you have the freedom to talk with passion about your subject, to add personality and to adapt to the unique circumstances of every presentation.
It’s not a new approach, but it’s still not one that I think is used often enough - especially by me! Having tried it though, I’m never going back. Looking to the future, it’s also a style that’s far more effective for online presentations where the audience is even less forgiving.
Photo from Chris Young, Netskills. All rights reserved.
Evangelism & Pragmatism June 4, 2008
Posted by nspb in : Training , add a comment
photo: www.flickr.com/photos/coba/1825369
I’m naturally sceptical about most things - including new technology - so it came as a shock to be called an ‘evangelist’ recently. To me that conjures up an image of someone whose desperate attempts to persuade people to agree with their views just makes them sound like a nutter! So have I been brainwashed by the shiny new technologies, or are they really offering something different that’s worth evangelising about?
One of the (few) perks of my job as a trainer is being paid to play with new technologies so that I can help other people understand their potential. That often puts me in the position of trying to ‘convert’ people to users of technology. I like to think I give a balanced view, but recently I’ve found my self saying much more about the advantages and far less about the issues - so what’s changed?
Well, first the tools have just got better. By that, I mean the technologies freely available to any web user, not just those of us working in universities. My friends used to be jealous of the tools my institution provided, but now even my mum uses web tools that are every bit as powerful.
It’s also a lot easier to get started. You don’t need the support of an IT department to use Googlemail, Netvibes or Facebook. There’s no download, no installation and no financial cost. Together with improving interoperability that also means that picking the wrong technology has less consequences than it used to. Don’t like you’re free social bookmarking tool, then move to another freebie with a couple of clicks (as i did recently).
But what about the problems? Unlike my idea of an evangelist, I can still see problems with the technologies I preach about. For one, adopting any new technology is difficult, no matter how intuitive they are. I know people who doggedly stick with outdated technologies simply because they’ve got used to them. It’s amazing what people with put up with to avoid change. So in an age where new tools are appearing at an unprecedented rate, people can feel overwhelmed by the choice. It also means there’s the gap between early and late adopters is getting wider.
Another is that powerful tools can be dangerous in untrained hands. With new tools seemingly being so intuitive, many people understandably don’t think training is necessary. But without understanding some of the basics of how the web works, that can lead to problems. An example that springs to mind is friends wondering why it takes to long to upload photos from their digital SLRs to facebook. When I start talking about compression, they just start to glaze over.
Overall though, I think there are more dangers in not using new technologies than there are in using them. That’s why I think evangelism is also the pragmatic approach. So I’ll try not to t take offense next time someone calls me an evangelist!
Being less del.icio.us with Diigo May 19, 2008
Posted by nspb in : social media , 1 comment so far
I recently moved from one social bookmarking service (delicious) to another (Diigo) and was pleasantly surprised how painless and worthwhile an exercise this was. So here’s some notes on why and how you might want to move too…
Delicious has been around a while now, which means it’s well known and has lots of users. But I find its’ interface basic and at times frustrating, so have been looking for a suitable alternative for a while. Enter Diigo, a service with similar features to delicious, but with an interface that feels like a breath of fresh air. It also has a couple of extra features of real use to me as a Netskills trainer.
Like any self-respecting social bookmarking tool, Diigo offers tagging, RSS feeds for just about everything, public and private posts, a range of widgets and a Firefox extension - but so does delicious, so what’s new?
Groups: Create an invite only group for team working or join a public group of likeminded individuals
Highlighting & annotation: Don’t just bookmark a page, but specific bits of it - and add annotations that can be private, shared to a group, or public.
Ordered Lists: At last, the ability to drag & drop bookmarks for display your in the order you want, not just the date you added them (0r by using some complicated naming & tagging conventions).
Web slides: A built in app for demonstrating sites - simple, but useful to us trainers.
Import/export for IE/Firefox: Create a bookmark file to import back into your browser, or someone else’s.
Feel free to have a look around my Diigo bookmarks and those of some of my colleagues at Netskills.
If I’ve convinced you to give Diigo a try, getting your bookmarks into it from somewhere else is pretty simple. It supports import from delicious and other bookmarking services, as well as from a file.
If you want to edge your bets for a while longer, the Firefox extension lets you post to several bookmarking services simulataneously. That’s what I’m doing, but only until those poor delicious users realise that the grass really is greener over here 
Too much of a good thing? May 15, 2008
Posted by nspb in : slideshare, conferences, JISC , add a commentI recently ran a parallel session at the JISC Users & Innovation programme’s Next Generation Environments conference with my colleague Will Allen.
The session titled Too Much of a Good Thing? Individual & institutional responses to emergent technologies explored the implications of an ever-increasing range of web services that staff and students are using as well as, or even in preference to, the tools provided by their institution.
I started off with a presentation that posed lots of loaded questions designed to provoke an audience reaction (slides embedded at end of this post), such as can and should institutions control the tools individuals use? Are IT services the gatekeepers? How do we cater for the next generation arriving at our institutions with a range of user-owned technologies?
Will then ran a lively discussion session in which groups were tasked with answering questions like these from different perspectives. Despite an early start on the second day of the conference, we had a respectable turnout who certainly had plenty to say on the subject. In fact, they we’re still arguing about the best approaches well into the coffee break after the session.
And it seems interest in this subject wasn’t confined to the conference. I uploaded our slides to Slideshare to make them available to people who attended the session, but we we’re staggered to get over 1000 hits and 160 downloads in less than a week. It certainly helped that Slideshare made it a ‘featured presentation’, but I suspect that was based more on the nice (stock) photos than the content.
So hopefully we’ll have plenty of people to approach when it comes to writing this session up for the conference proceedings and for some other studies we’re about to start.
As to the rest of the conference, it was a very interesting event and it was great to talk to people trying out some really innovative stuff. But that’s another post…
