Presentations, hot and not

Everyone knows I think computers are evil and that they wait for the perfect moment to turn on us. That moment is often when one wishes to give a presentation.

Some thoughts about being prepared for presentations, and some newer ideas in presentation:

1. Turn on and log into your laptop before you need to start presenting! All you should have to do is wake your computer from sleep.

2. If you are hooking your laptop up to a foreign projector, try to make sure it works before you have to present. Just a few minutes before the "show" can save a lot of heartache when you present. At the very least, you'll know when you stand up that you don't have the visuals you planned on and can adjust your talk accordingly.

3. When at all possible, use the computer that's already there rather than hooking up yours. I usually have a Mac and the moment when I need to hook up my Mac to a regular VGA connector is the moment that the special Mac adapter goes missing - and the adapter is sufficiently different for different models and years that I can't guarantee someone else in the audience will have one. When I travel, I try to use a computer that's already there and set up for other presenters.

4. Suspenders, belt, and another belt. I put a backup copy of my EDUCAUSE presentation on a USB drive as well as uploaded one to a totally different Google account from the one in which it was living (my presenters and I collaborated on the presentation in GoogleDocs). Come hell or high water, I want to have at least one copy of the slides to show. Of course at that point version control is your issue. If you make changes up to the last minute, you won't have backup copies if you need them. Finishing BEFORE the last minute is therefore recommended.

Personally I hate PowerPoint and I hate bullet-text slides. Lots of people who've heard me say this over the years probably know I just gave a talk at EDUCAUSE with bullet-text slides (at least we built it in GoogleDocs). I feel like for a one-time talk, certainly for a conference, slides are forgivable because you do have talking points you don't want to forget, and usually data (even who you are and what school you're from) that you don't want to have to repeat or even say out loud but which are worth showing on the screen.

In the classroom, however, I strongly feel that bullet-text slides should be used sparingly, if at all. Graphs and images, by all means. But bulleted text is almost an instruction to the students to read, not listen to you; and if you darken the room at all, some tuning out, if not outright snoozing, is bound to follow.

I saw two innovations in presentation technology at EDUCAUSE that I thought were used to good effect:

First, several presenters used Prezi, the new tool that lets you build a presentation from a larger mind-map type of collection of text and images. I don't know why this is so much less boring than bullet-text slides, but it is. No matter how you focus, you know there's more image, more information or ideas, outside the frame of the screen at any one time, and somehow that's exciting. Plus just the movement indicates more of a physical relationship between the ideas than the linear march of slides. I really enjoyed the Prezi presentations that I saw and I intend to try this tool myself.

Another idea was a format, not a tool. Shelly Rodrigo's "You Are 3.0" panel used Ignite presentations to good effect. I think they were actually going more for a Pecha Kucha effect. Speakers spoke for just a couple of minutes each, with automatically advancing slides moving (sometimes with them, sometimes pushing them along, I will admit). This was almost a performance art style of presentation. The images and info on the screen amplified or illustrated what the presenters said, and added depth and interest to the presentations rather than flattening them out. The speed, while a challenge to follow (and probably a challenge to deliver), also contributed to the sense of receiving a rich but high-level idea - concepts or words stood out, not a flow of connected sentences that built together to form a cohesive linear whole.

I'm a big fan of sentences building on one another to form a cohesive whole, but in the same way that a picture of Ahab will not give me the entire substance of Moby Dick, a presentation seldom conveys everything interesting or valuable about what a presenter knows. I find I still want to read their papers or books, however, after an idea grasps me from a Prezi or Ignite presentation - and that doesn't always happen with bullet-text slides.