As so often happens, television picked up on it and I was rung by a producer to offer comments as a media psychologist. You can read something about what happened at this link here from the Metaverse Journal website. A video of my interview is below:

After that breakfast, a brutal workshop with a personal trainer (2012 resolution in action), it was time to settle back to watch the Apple Education Event whose details I had been avoiding all morning. That’s been my habit these past few years: avoiding another’s opinions and perceptions of Apple keynotes, and trusting my own reactions first.

In my previous post (scroll down), I had made some predictions as to what we might see announced, and I was particularly interested to see the fate of Keynote and Pages – indeed, iWork in general – should Apple roll out an iTunes Scholar app (called iTunes U in the event) as well as an book authoring tool, whether it be a beefed up Pages or a new app entirely.

As it turned out, it was both. Yes, a new app called iTunes Author but with an exceptionally close resemblance to Pages.

But my heart was gladdened, having been buoyed by learning iWork’s VP Roger Rosner had been seconded to the iBooks team, when I saw how Keynote was integrated into the iBooks Author workflow, something I had discussed in my earlier blog post.

While neither it nor Pages received published updates, it’s clear to me they will, given iBooks Author is only in version 1.0. As Apple watchers know, such versions are quite acceptable as they are for initial versions – very functional with great ease of use based on familiarity with other Apple apps. There are clear omissions which some with a predilection to diss all things Apple will seize upon, but again long term Apple observers know they will eat their words and look sheepish when V 1.5 then V 2.0 rolls out in a few months.

Witness the same thing when Keynote 1.0 for the iPad was released. Now it is a very competent app., and I expect even more feature matching (with desktop Keynote 5) when the iPad 3 is released soon with its beefier CPU and graphics.

So, with my worst fears that Keynote was to be orphaned not realised and indeed almost a centre of attention with its place in the iBooks Author workflow and feature set, I could concentrate on the event’s central message: Apple is about the inovation experience, supported by its hardware.

In returning to its educational roots, Apple once more puts itself forward as a technology company that can do it all, supplying hardware, software and content for a specialised cohort in real need of innovation.

All the time I was watching this trifecta in action, I kept thinking how any Android-based tablet maker is going to make any headway into the K-12 marketplace. Yes, I expect to hear many complaints not merely of an Apple walled-garden but such a severe lock-in as to call it a moat. Especially with respect to exclusivity of iBooks Authored works being sold only within the iBooks store. Of course, if you repackage the contents for another ePub service using other publishing/creation tools, Apple has no lock on you. Perhaps that other service does. So it seems to me Apple is applying the same prohibitions and permissions as it does for apps you create using its proprietary coding. Yes, you might create the images in Photoshop and the words in MS Word, but if you lay it out and include iBooks Author’s wrapping to publish it, yep, it’s exclusive to Apple. The content and IP is still your’s; how and where you choose to create and publish the final work is your choice.

The lock in to iPads has some arguing families will not be able to afford iPads. These are fair criticisms, but if we wait a little longer, let’s see the price of an iPad 2 when the iPad 3 is released. It’s made its moolah for Apple, and perhaps will be reduced to a more affordable $399 or even a version for $299. Do kids spend this much on Nike sneakers nowadays?

So Android-based tablets might be cheaper or even preferred by those filled with anti-Apple sentiments, but where’s the content? Apple seems to have sewn up those educational textbook makers who in the USA control 90% of the market, according to figures shown at the Apple Education event.

Where do Android-based tablets go in this marketplace? Nowhere, I think, perhaps left to focus on the enterprise setting. But if you were Toshiba or ASUS or Acer or even Microsoft, you’d be worried that children in Kindergarten are being exposed to Apple’s iPad economy, and they will accept the iPad form factor as the norm for “computing”. I put this in quotes because I’m trying to think of another term these children will use as they grow up, because it’s not the computer their parents have known to be a computer.

And you know what? Those kids won’t care. It’ll be called an iPad. That’s sufficient.

[UPDATE: I have added the Sunrise TV video from YouTube, corrected some of the spelling errors from commenters, and in gratitude, include this cartoon:]

Some time back I wrote about this possibility here on this blog:

Click on the screenshot to go to the blog entry

Notice, will you, the date of this entry: January 7, 2010. The iPad 1 keynote was held on January 27, almost three weeks later, so at the time of writing we were still in the “tablet rumour” phase of iPad’s release.

But it seemed so certain that a tablet was on its way – although up to the day before no one guessed its name – that bloggers like me were already envisioning what its release would mean. For consumers and various industries too, such as publishing.

In my blog entry, this is what I wrote about scholarly publishing:

“Well, I’m saying the same thing to Steve Jobs: “Steve, mate, help science along by luring the publishing world in with a tablet as a lifeline to a dying industry, then grab them by the short and curlies like you did with the music industry!”

What I was referring to was the outlandish price of academic texts, both in book form, as well as downloadable articles for which the major publishing houses still charge anywhere between $25 and $35 for a PDF of perhaps only a few pages.

It’s wild-eyed pricing, given there are so many ways to obtain the same article, from writing directly to the lead author, going to their academic website where their publications are often listed for download, asking a friend with an academic position to get it for you, or using a search engine to eventually locate it. I would say 90% of the time I am successful with one of these methods within a few hours. Remember too, that authors get no royalties, and in some cases are prohibited from distributing their own published work as a condition of being published in a prestigious journal.

The other idea not unique to my thinking when contemplating the Apple tablet was self-publication, something which has been hinted at being included on Thursday, and for which Apple tools, like Pages, already exist, partially.

It seems the iPad is ideal for turning academic texts on their heads, including highly engaging visuals in enhanced versions. Late last year, I bought on iBooks an enhanced book about the dog, Rin Tin Tin, by Susan Orleans.

Note in the screenshot, below, both the book’s cover, and the list of videos within the book’s “covers” (page 14):

Cover and list of chapters

And if you go to Page 14, you’ll see the video listings:

List of Videos in Susan Orlean's Rin Tin Tin

And finally, without showing the movie in action, this is what it looks like, embedded, bearing in mind you can make the video full screen, as well as play it through Airplay to a monitor:

(UPDATE: My colleague Anthony Caruana asks about keeping open multiple books when say working on essays, as one does in analogue format. My response is that a beefed up iPad 3 may allow more multitasking, so that you can have multiple books open “behind” each other, and using an Misson Control-like  spread of the fingers, all the books can be seen, much like you can see all the apps or docs when using Mac OS X (below):

Hold the icon down in the Dock, and Show All Windows

Moreover, by using the iPad’s screenshot capabilities you can, as I have above, copy and paste in quotations from sources, to show you actually obtained them, rather than requoting from another source without sighting the original.)

I expect we may see a beefed up Pages announced on Thursday to assist the self-publishing process beyond its current format, and if that is the case, perhaps a reworked iWork 12 too – although it’s tiring to keep flogging a near moribund horse. Who knows, perhaps a new app. to be added to the iWork coterie.

Creating an ePub in Pages is very limited, and indeed you cannot use the professionally created page layout templates Pages comes with to create an ePub. See below:

You can create a vanilla style document and insert video into it, and it will export to ePub format for transfer to an iDevice, like an iPad, using the word processor templates:

While you only see a still image, above, it’s actually a movie file I created for last year’s Macworld (Keynote on the iPad).

But that’s all well and good for private use and sharing. But what if I want to use Keynote and Pages to make a book for sale, perhaps starting with Presentation Magic using Keynote with all the effects and tutorials from my workshops? Rather than have handouts using lots of trees at workshops, why not gift my book for iPads and iPhones so that workshop attendees can either follow along (not my preferred option) or review the workshop afterwards with all the techniques I used explained and illustrated in much more detail?

And of course, the book is for sale on iBooks for a nominal price. Doesn’t this take self-publication to a whole new level? Yes, and like so many things Apple does, it’s been done before, but not this way and not this easily.

The next step is to take on the webinar, online training and Continuing Professional Education fields, which is worth billions.

Using the same tools authors use for their daily work, users could easily take their presentations and workshops and rework them for sale later without the extra expensive outside contractors needed to do it currently. Go and take a look at my APEX presentation of September 12, 2011, which I blogged about here.

The video I mention which is on YouTube was created using Keynote for the slides and presentation, my iPhone 4 to record the video and audio, and ScreenFlow to assemble the exported Keynote slides as a video and the iPhone output into a YouTube video.

This was a one person operation using inexpensive software, which easily lends itself to self-publishing workshops, and which can be value-added with an enhanced book for sale on iBooks Scholar (I just named it that). Perhaps Apple will release more tools for self-publishing a la Garageband integrating the output of Keynote, Pages and iMovie and then uploading them, like a podcast to iTunes University or the iBooks store.

The time is surely right to take on the world of science publishing, and I’m of the belief that this was in fact literally Steve Jobs’ dying wish – to disintermediate another industry which has become lazy and lacked innovation because no one dared stand up to it, much less the scientists who grasp the publishing industry’s teets for their tenured lives.

Publishing on Thursday and Television later in the year: it’s going to be a very interesting year in the science and creative arts in 2012.

[UPDATE: The website, 9-5Mac, reports an interesting juxtaposition occurring. An entry, without naming its author, suggests that Apple's iWork Vice-President, Roger Rosner, has been transferred and "will be heading up the development of Apple's entry into the textbook market."

This is under Apple Senior VP, Eddy Cue, whose presenting style in Apple keynotes I'm no great fan of, but he is one heck of a smart operator, recently promoted, and I believe mentored by Steve Jobs, especially during the iTunes music rollout.

What this means for iWork is open for speculation. Will it mean tighter integration between iWork and Apple's efforts to bring self-publishing tools to the marketplace in the form of Pages 5 (or iWork 12) or a new application, as suggested in my main blog entry, above? And what of Keynote? Abandoned or beefed up to to assist the creative aspects of self-publishing enhanced books, with audio, video and embedded animations, especially in textbooks?]

In the first, I feature something I spend some time on in Presentation Magic workshops, especially for scientists and academics, and that is the use of data visualization or good old graphs and charts. (I cite Edward Tufte and Stephen Few’s work richly, as well as Florence Nightingale. Huh? You’ll have to attend to understand why!)

Keynote is very rich in ways to graphically illustrate data, and there are better ways than others to use such visuals to engage your audience and explain complex relationships even to naive audiences. Some would say a great graph is the best way to work with such audiences.

In the video below, I look at a very simple graph which is a Keynote default comparing two regions’ growth over a time period. What I’m interested in is the area between the lines, as you’ll see, below.

Keynote will let you fill in titles and axis labels at your leisure

You could draw each line separately, or you could show them both simultaneously, then highlight as I have in the video, below, the meaning of the area between the lines.

So here is the video of the effect I’d like you to think about. The wipe transition I used to fill the area between the brown and green lines is not a current feature of Keynote, so how was it done?

In the second brain tease, literally, I’m showing a glow callout, as I like to call it. Here is where I emulate as best I can in standard Keynote 5 a CGI effect from a professional documentary. I showed a similar effect to the Keynote engineering team a few years ago in the hope they could include such an effect yet with Apple simplicity of use in the next version of Keynote. Still waiting…

Can you deduce how it was done? Solutions in the next few days…

UPDATE: Lots of clever Keynote users out there skipping steps and coming up with solutions in the comments. Perhaps these challenges are too easy for some.

Still, at Macworld workshops, my experience is that many people are hungry to learn Keynote’s tricks of the trade, as well as incorporate third party apps to make up for its deficiencies. More of that to come. If you are a self-proclaimed Keynote guru, send along a challenging quicktime movie of your effect, and let’s see how the crowds source an answer. But only created in Keynote please.

In the lead up to my two presentations at Macworld in a few weeks time, I’m creating some Keynote effects which I hope will tantalise and enchant my intended audience.

Since there will be more people reading this blog than will attend, I thought I’d use you as a guinea pig to beta test some of my ideas. I’m going to put up some Keynote effects over the course of the next few weeks until I depart for San Francisco. The challenge will be if you can work out how I did it – and whether you think they are effects worth demonstrating and teaching at Macworld.

I was thinking about this in December, but my accidental discovery of a video on Vimeo (I’ve been playing with the AppleTV over the hot, slow days of summer here in Australia) has moved the schedule forward.

In fact, the effect I’m going to show you is one I didn’t create, but one created for a “sneak peek” keynote at Supermeet NAB Las Vegas in mid-April before the official  launch of Final Cut Pro X in  June 2011.

Now even if you don’t use FCP X, but you’re an Apple follower, you’ll know the huge ruckus this rewrite created in the professional editing community, with many saying it was iMovie Pro or “iMovie on steroids”, lamenting the lack of compatibility with previous versions, the exclusion of much loved previous features, and so on. I’ve been predicting for a while now that Keynote too will get the FCP X “treatment” when its next upgrade is released, and that prediction is somewhat forged by Apple’s long time between updates suggesting a rewrite. And if Apple can do what it did to its professional users with FCP X, it will certainly have no second thoughts about Keynote, which is in desperate need of a rewrite too, if only to put a “Magic timeline” into being. It too might be called a Magnetic timeline as it is for FCP X, (see live link, below).

I want to feature a video from Vimeo taken at the Las Vegas sneak peek of FCP X, by Emanuel Pamperi. It shows FCP X’s chief architect, Peter Steinauer, going through some of its feature set, to much rousing applause (especially the price of $299!). That applause turned to dismay when the same crowd got its hands on FCP X in June, from previously mentioned reports. There were even “Hitler parodies” made, wondering what Apple was thinking when it made the serious changes it did! (Link: http://www.google.com.au/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=hitler+parody+final+cut)

Emanuel’s video is in two sections of 25 minutes, and you can see section 1 in its entirety here (but don’t go there just yet): http://vimeo.com/22329493

About 9:10 in Steinauer introduces new features known as Content Auto Analysis where FCP X analyses the raw data such as searching for faces or crowds or colour matching. I’ve taken the video and edited it so you see how he brings in each feature, starting with the raw source (an SD card) and its target (an iMac).

Here is the edited feature set below (edited, because it’s not in real time and there’s no sound track):

1. Notice how the sequence begins with three elements: SD Card -> iMac

2. The first feature – what would be a dreary bullet point in another presentation software – comes in, separating the SD card and iMac with move builds. Notice how the arrow duplicates and separates in the one build. Probably there were two arrows layered over each other in step 1, and each arrow moved as part of the build. (Well, that’s how I would have done it.)

3. New features are added from the bottom up in table format, again keeping the focus on the features in an animated fashion, rather than static bullet points.

4. But do you notice something I’ve not been able to duplicate? Each new cell of the table both dissolves in and moves upward as the whole table moves to make room? Please go back and have another look because it’s easy to miss.

5. I’ve tried to reproduce this but Keynote 5 will not let a move and dissolve build together: it’s only after one build completes that the other build can occur, as the screen shot below shows. There is no Automatically with option.

6. So either I’m missing something, or what we saw at Las Vegas was a new Keynote feature, something I’m sure many of us could put to good use as we attempt to rid the world of bullet points!

I asked my esteemed Keynote colleague and theme creator John Driedger to have a go, and he came up with the same semi-solution as I did: we can move, then dissolve but not at the same time. (John will hopefully have some new themes and elements for me to show at Macworld).

So, over to you: Can you reproduce the effect here just using Keynote; do we have evidence of a new Keynote feature; or merely that the keynote author used a third party motion app to create the effect?

If you think you can do it in Keynote, email your Keynote file to me (lesatlesposen.com), I’ll verify it and post it as an update here. No prizes (yet!)

UPDATE (Jjanuary 5) : Problem solved using MagicMove and opacity controls. Well done to Spydre for suggesting this solution!

One of the things I’ve been doing in Presentation Magic workshops in 2011 is showing presentations by others and asking attendees to offer up a critical analysis of what they’re witnessing, based on the presentation principles so far addressed.

One of the primary sources for high quality presentations across a variety of styles and subjects has been the official TED website. Here, we’ve seen an increasing professionalism in the quality of both slides and presentation. Even Bill Gates has shown vast improvement.

Less so, but no less instructive, is the TEDx satellite circuit, where organisers can license the TED brand according to some very strict rules. Here, the quality control is much more varied, and occasionally one gets the feeling favours are offered to speakers by organisers. That was certainly my experience at the TEDx I attended in Canberra a few years back where I scratched my head at the inclusion of one or two speakers. Their presentations were poor, and seemed not to fit the theme of the day.

Moreover, the organisers had not thought to offer a vanity or confidence monitor for speakers, who continually turned their backs to the audience to view the screen behind them, some reading off their displayed slides. My tweets were very critical of the presentation style of some presenters.

This week, while on the lookout for more presentations to showcase at Macworld, I located the TedX BayArea Global Women Entrepreneurs event.

I was actually doing my usual search for all things Apple, when I located a talk at the event which mentioned Apple, by well known tech journalist, Kara Swisher.

I was aware of Kara’s work from her interviews with Steve Jobs, as well as her authoring a book quite a few years ago on the rise and fall of AOL, in which Apple had played a small part (if you recall eWorld).

Her talk was entitled, More, and on her blog called BoomTown, which is an RSS feed I see each day, this is how she had described it:

I recalled that Kara had been indisposed for the All Things Digital event in Hong Kong recently where she had planned to share the stage with co-host Walt Mossberg. And I was aware she’d suffered a stroke. Her speech description intrigued me so I was prepared to sit back and watch her for the standard 18 minute Tedx Talk.

Here is the speech below, from the YouTube site. Watch all of it before you come back, or just the first five minutes and make a mental note of your emotional response to what you witness.

What did you notice?

For me, there were several things that felt like the proverbial fingernails down the blackboard sensation.

1. Did she start her speech by dissing her host for mispronouncing her name? Did this set the tone for a rather snarky speech that followed? There seems to be no one safe from her sarcasm: United Airlines, Microsoft, Rupert Murdoch (her employer) to name a few.

2. Kara was placed between two screens showing her slides and spend about 80% of her time looking at the screens, and not at the audience. Even when the slides were no longer relevant to the story she was telling.

3. Within fourteen seconds, the thing that most got in the way of her presentation made its presence felt: “Um”. There were other connectors too, such as “Er” and “you know” but these did not grate on me nearly as much as the incessant river of “Ums”.

Now these might go right under your attention radar because the content of the speech is riveting and engaging for you. But for me nowadays, I attend to both process and content. Not just what is being said, but how are the ideas being conveyed?

In Kara’s case,  I appreciated her attempts at sarcasm and the occasional self-depracating dig and had a laugh too. But there is a quantum of hubris in this speech which is unattractive and disengaging, not helped by the torrent of Ums.

Curiously, in her blog writeup of the speech she actually refers to her ums, viz:

“…women in tech, and, um, sparkly vampires.” (see screenshot, above).

So I decided to see what her talk would be like without the “ums” included, but leaving in other connectors and pauses. I imported the video downloaded from Firefox into iMovie and edited out all the ums. In a moment I’ll reveal how many there were in her 20″ speech.

You can see the results below, and do note that the video does jump about a little, so if this bothers you, just look away and listen, and ask if her speech flows better without the ums.

But the fun discovery was what I did with the edited elements. Sometime ago, I had work led on a Keynote project where we had to include a sound file of an interview. It was recorded in Garageband, and it was in there that I edited out long pauses, “you knows”, “ums” and long breaths to give the podcast some polish.

It sounded so much better and professional, smooth and flowing.

So in Kara’s case, I look all the out taken “ums” and put them together in chronological order. The resultant movie file is below, and I’ve topped and tailed it with the intro and finish elements. What’s astounding is both the number of “ums” and how much time they take up out of an 18″ speech (actually it was more like 20″).

So, how many “ums” were there? Watch the video below, and I’ll give you the number below it.

If you can be bothered counting, there are about 96 Ums which fully take up a minute of her allotted time. That’s 6% of her total speech in connectors.

A little analysis

There are many ways to think about these utterances. Rarely do they add to the comprehensibility of the speech. For a few of them, they are cues for the audience to laugh: “Hey, I’ve said something funny – this is where you laugh.” It allows the audience to take a moment to digest what’s just been said before Kara moves on. Stage actors in rehearsal without an audience need to know from the director sometimes when to pause when the audience is expected to laugh, otherwise the next funny line goes unheard.

Jack Benny would merely pause and look at the audience for it to be their cue to laugh.

Other shows of course employ a laugh track to goad us into enjoying the performances. And many other comedians have found their own way, from the raising of an eyebrow, or the curve of a lip, to let you know it’s OK to laugh at this point.

However, in Kara’s case there are less than a handful of these. Most of the ums are signatures of other less redeeming aspects of a presentation.

To my eyes and ears, these other ums and other connectors like “er” and “you know” are signs of under-preparedness, too little rehearsal, anxiety, and attempts to wing it, possibly in the belief that the spontaneous retelling of her story will suffice.

Let me be straight with you. I don’t rehearse all eight hours of my Presentation Magic workshops. I do rehearse each of the slides and how best to use it to tell my story. I don’t write the lines out, nor add them to my slides in Keynote’s presentation mode. Rather, every so often I’ll use the Post-It note style comment icon to remind me of the movie that’s coming next, or a factoid that I’ve forgotten on a previous occasion. But I don’t memorise every word. I simply rehearse – lots.

In a TED talk however, you’ve only got 18″ minutes to make your story count, no matter how famous you are. You need to be rehearsed and unless you’ve really got vast experience winging it, like a stage comedian dealing with hecklers, you’re better not hoping for the best on the day.

Kara’s “um’s”, snarkiness and her leaving her essential message right to the very end – it’s OK to work to your own schedule even if you’re ill  - requires her to use Steve Jobs to provide ultimate evidence of her belief. He arguably produced his most influential and lasting creations while fighting cancer, so anything’s possible if you apply yourself.

I tweeted Kara to say I had watched her speech but her “ums” needed some work, to which she replied shortly afterwards,  ”forest, trees”. Our next tweets ended up with her reinforcing her point I simply didn’t understand her speech, and ultimately would never “get it”.

Kara’s a very influential person in the tech world, an employee of Rupert Murdoch’s, but ultimately when you get up on stage in front of a live audience and another one which may number in the thousands who’ll watch you for years to come on YouTube, you owe it to your audience to be rehearsed and prepared, especially if you want your story to be persuasive. I include modifying your idiosyncratic speaking style to minimise your off-putting connectors. It’s something I continue to work on for myself.

By the way, I did give some thought that perhaps her anxiety or frequency of “ums” was a possible aftermath of her stroke, but locating other speeches she’d given before the stroke suggest this is Kara’s usual speaking style.

Your thoughts? Am I making too big a deal out of this, or did I miss something that is important to you?

UPDATE: Two predictable responses on Twitter and on a blog.

@karaswisher asks on Twitter if I have nothing better to do (presuming she’s read the blog) and the simple answer is we’re on holidays here in Australia, so things are slow, and I am putting together my Macworld syllabus and Kara’s presentation is a possible inclusion. Many people do want to know how to control their speech style even in workshops on Keynote. It’s value adding.

Over on his personal blog, Jose de Silva essentially agrees with Kara that I’ve mistaken the forest for the trees and have lost sight of locating a presenter’s content. My counter-argument (which I would have written on his blog if comments were allowed) has always been that audiences should not be made to work so hard to decipher the message. That you can assist the transfer of learning process by making it easier through an understanding of adult models of learning (see the work of Richard Mayer for examples), stagecraft, design and rehearsal. Make an audience work too hard and no matter who you are or your subject, they will disengage and reach for their iPhones to play Angry Birds.

I agree with Jose about Kara’s being a superb journalist with a little snark, and perhaps not having time to better prepare her speech. Is this a sufficient explanation? No, it’s not. One can do both. (Or, to parallel Apple, don’t ship a product until it’s ready and capable). We can all do with a little help with our presentations, and I have only just missed out seeing Edward Tufte in New York January 23 because I booked my flights to Macworld too swiftly without checking Tufte’s 2012 schedule. My learning plan for this year is to see him and Stephen Few and really upskill my data visualisation prowess. This is especially as I’ll be targeting scientists and educators this year with my Presentation Magic workshops and blog. Finally, if you look around the various presentation blogs, I’m one of the few who puts up his unedited workshop evaluations in all their “glory”, not just positive testimonials.

You gotta take it if you’re gonna dish it!

Happy Holidays, Joe and Kara!

In the past week, I’ve been featured in the Fairfax media MacMan column on my work with Apple’s Keynote presentation software (see it here). A small screen shot is below:

(Welcome to new readers who have followed me as a result of reading this article. Hopefully, your investment of time will pay off.)

Also during the week, in an effort to maintain my professional development standing, where I must accumulate 30 hours of approved learning over a prescribed period, I attended a workshop sponsored by my professional society on Sleeping Disorders in Children. Here’s the Certifcate of Attendance below:

My professional development hours are mandatory in several ways. Without performing the necessary hours I would find myself in trouble with both my professional society, as well as my national registration body, and Medicare, Australia’s nationalised medicine scheme, where my patients can receive a rebate of in excess of $120 for each of 10 annual visits.

Each period of assessment which in this cycle lasts from July 2010 to November 2011, asks psychologists to provide at the outset a learning plan: What do you hope to learn about the professional practice of psychology during this period?

Below, is the exact form we are required to fill in at the commencement  of the professional development cycle:

In the case of the Sleeping Disorders workshop I undertook this week, it conforms with my training needs because one of the desires I have is to learn things about which I know very little or have no immediate practical need.

In the case of this workshop, I don’t believe I have ever seen a child for a sleep disorder in 30 years of clinical work. I’m not saying I haven’t seen a child with a sleep disorder – I have. It’s more that the referral has been for some other issue such as anxiety or depression of which sleep may be a component. So I don’t hang out a shingle that this is an area of specialisation but my desire to do the workshop was to challenge myself to attend a workshop for which there is no practical purpose. Strange, huh?

The purpose however reminds me of the times I have attended very expansive psychology conventions where there are more than 30 parallel sessions. While I’ll attend quite a few where I expect to apply any learning directly to my clinical practice, I’ll also attend other convention presentations to hear the “names” in my profession present, even if their field is not something I pay particular attention to –   who knows when I will ever have the same opportunity to hear them.

But I also wander into presentations whose fields I know nothing about, where I have minimal prior knowledge of the subject, and where I’m likely to not know the names of authors or experimenters being referenced, nor their body of work, nor the acronyms or special concepts. I enter de novo. As a teacher to psychologists (and others) of presentation skills, it’s a great opportunity to see leaders in their field, as well as first timers, present their stuff, and think about their presentation style and what I can learn for inclusion in my next workshop.

I must say however, that most times I attend psychology workshops and conventions, my learning is mainly what not to do, rather than come away thinking positively I really ought to include that in my workshop.

But going into those lectures with no prior background nor interest in how I will apply what I’ll witness (thus not needing to contemplate if I am up to date, or if my knowledge is sorely underwhelming i.e, the pressure is off) is truly liberating.

Without sitting in unconscious judgement of my own knowledge gaps, I am at liberty to think outside the box, or so I have discovered. I can make large intellectual leaps, because invariably what I learn ends up having some unpredicted relevance to my own work. I go in without pre-conceived ideas, with my only critical faculty being one of witnessing usually unimpressive presentation skills.

This phenomenon is well known to those who witness quantum leaps in understanding when two seemingly unconnected fields of knowledge come together. Each field’s “blindspots” are laid bare, their dogma of “it can’t be done” challenged by the other group’s unawareness of what has been tried and found to have – up to now – failed. The self-imposed limitations of one field are the challenges to another.

I was reminded of this with the reading of Steve Jobs’ authorised biography. The Macintosh group’s naming of Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field (RDF) (below) was not so much based on his salesmanship and marketing of Apple products, but his ability to convince his workers that what they thought was not possible, was possible.

Shown above is the original Mac team from Walter Isaacson’s book, and the history of the RDF is described, thus:

“Steve has a reality distortion field” (Bud Tribble)… “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything.”

There are several dozen references to the RDF in the biography, not just within Chapter 11. Of significance is its mention at the launch of Jobs’ NeXT computer in the time he was away from Apple.

Demonstrating why the NeXT “(had) made the first real digital books”, Jobs said: “There has not been an advancement in the state of the printed book technology since Gutenberg”. (Even though the NeXT failed commercially, Jobs desire to revolutionise the printed book and turn another industry on its head lives on in the shape of the iPad.)

While demonstrating the NeXT, Isaacson writes of Jobs:

“… he used the quotations book to make a more subtle point,  about his reality distortion field. The quote he chose was from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (orig. ital.). After Alice laments that no matter how hard she tries she can’t believe impossible things, the White Queen retorts, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Especially from the front rows (of the NeXT demonstration audience), there were roars of knowing laughter.”

The idea of professions learning from each other, and respecting how each can make a contribution, is well known in health care, where patients may well be seen by several different health practitioners who care about the global health of the patient, rather than their own specialisation.

To work together, the professions must learn about each other, and this has become known as InterProfessional Education (IPE).

Take a look at this definition from Western University:

PE is generally accepted to mean

“Occasions when (students) from two or more professions learn with, from and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care”.

- Freeth et al. Effective Interprofessional Education:
Development, Delivery & Evaluation. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK, 2005.

The World Health Organization recently described IPE and collaborative practice is to mean. “Interprofessional education occurs when students from two or more professions learn about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes. Interprofessional education is a necessary step in preparing a ‘collaborative practice-ready’ health workforce that is better prepared to respond to local health needs. Source: World Health Organization (2010): Framework for Action on Interprofessional Education & Collaborative Practice”.

This is, by the way, why I was unhappy when my professional society wished to set up a mentor scheme for young psychologists and only wanted psychologists as mentors. I advised it would be too easy to confuse it with professional supervision, and mentoring would be best handled by experienced professionals outside of the practice of psychology. (That fell on deaf ears).

Let me now bring in the notion of Continuing Professional Education. My national registration body insists that:

“As a general guide, CPD (continuing professional development) activities should be relevant to the psychologist’s area of professional practice and have clear learning aims and objectives that meet the individual’s requirements”.

This of course leaves it wide open to argue what is defined as “relevant”, and indeed to even define what is a professional practice.

If for instance, I advertise my presentation skills training as almost unique in that few psychologists offer this training, and that my knowledge as a practising psychologist (spending 30 years persuading people to change) makes my workshops special, would my attending say Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen workshops which focusses less on my area of psychology and more on design theory be considered irrelevant?

But there is more to interprofessional collaboration and the gains to be made that just patient care. Surgeons and commercial pilots are getting together on a frequent and formal basis to learn about risk management mitigation strategies and preparedness, as I learnt from one fear of flying physician patient and his father who was a leading surgeon. He had brought his College of Surgeons and Qantas Safety culture experts together to learn from each other.

Going still further, yet returning to the point of one profession’s self-limitating beliefs and behaviours being challenged by collaborating with another profession, let me draw your attention to the book, below:

Hargadon’s book can be accessed in part from Googlebooks here but here’s an early main point:

This of course is why so many have compared Steve Jobs to Edison for their shared abilities to recognise the nature of innovation, bring disparate people together, and then in Jobs’ case in particular, get them to see beyond their own self-imposed limitations, not just their own profession’s with which they identify, and for which there can be various stigma applied if one steps out of prescribed, but often not coded, limits. I’ve been there, and done that with regard to my own profession, especially the application of technologies in psychological endeavours.

Also during the week, based on the article appearing in the media featuring my ideas on presenting and Keynote, I was contacted by a young psychologist (let’s call her by a nom de plume: Nicky) involved in a committee putting on a two day conference at which she was due to present on her Ph.D. Nicky asked if I would provide some coaching in constructing her message.

Not surprisingly, when I loaded her Powerpoint onto my Macbook Pro and projected it up on the wall, it contain the usual presentation errors I ask psychologists and other scientists to give consideration to: loads of text, small pixelated images of dubious relevance, lack of clarity as to the central message, overuse of concepts which needed further clarification before making the central point, disengaging use of article citations and their page numbers, and so on.

(At my Presentation Magic workshop at Macworld 2012, I’ll show for those in academia how to do this properly. My client, like so many I see, know that many presentations leave something to be desired, but have little idea what to do about it. The sooner those who train professionals understand that presentation skills is a teachable subject in demand for professional development, the sooner it will be included in syllabi, and the sooner presentations will improve. Based on the feedback I received a this year’s American Psychological Association convention in Washington, I completed the onerous task of applying to do a Presentation Magic workshop for continuing education for the APA Orlando convention, in August 2012.)

When I showed Nicky how I illustrate references, quotations, book titles and other devices using Keynote’s bag of tricks, she was wowed (as I expected). She “got it” immediately as most do when shown “before and after” slide modifications and we even worked through some simple transformations she could make before her presentation this week. All from an evidence-base.

Here’s her thank you email, with her ID obscured:

The good thing is both Nicky and I earn CPD points for this endeavour. (Update: I heard from Nicky her presentation went well and she is eager to return and play on her own with Keynote)

But today, through an obscure RSS feed, I came across a reference to the work of management guru, Peter Drucker. Published in INC., in 1997, his article entitled, My life as a Knowledge Worker, describes “seven personal experiences that taught (Drucker) how to grow, to change, and to age–without becoming a prisoner of the past”. The article itself is an adaptation from a 1996 book:  Drucker on Asia: The Drucker-Nakauchi Dialogue , by Peter F. Drucker and Isao Nakauchi,

I’m at an age and experience in my own profession where such articles draw me to them like a moth to a flame. And as you will see, there are parallels between Drucker as a management innovator, and that of Steve Jobs – uncannily so.

The First Parallel to Steve Jobs

Here is Drucker writing about his first experience:

THE FIRST EXPERIENCE 
Taught by Verdi

The work at the export firm was terribly boring, and I learned very little. Work began at 7:30 in the morning and was over at 4 in the afternoon on weekdays and at noon on Saturdays. So I had lots of free time. Once a week I went to the opera.

On one of those evenings I went to hear an opera by the great 19th-century Italian composer, Giuseppe Verdi–the last opera he wrote, Falstaff. It has now become one of Verdi’s most popular operas, but it was rarely performed then. Both singers and audiences thought it too difficult. I was totally overwhelmed by it. Although I had heard a great many operas, I had never heard anything like that. I have never forgotten the impression that evening made on me.

When I made a study, I found that this opera, with its gaiety, its zest for life, and its incredible vitality, was written by a man of 80! To me 80 was an incredible age. Then I read what Verdi himself had written when he was asked why, at that age, when he was already a famous man and considered one of the foremost opera composers of his century, he had taken on the hard work of writing one more opera, and an exceedingly demanding one. “All my life as a musician,” he wrote, “I have striven for perfection. It has always eluded me. I surely had an obligation to make one more try.”

I have never forgotten those words–they made an indelible impression on me. When he was 18 Verdi was already a seasoned musician. I had no idea what I would become, except that I knew by that time that I was unlikely to be a success exporting cotton textiles. But I resolved that whatever my life’s work would be, Verdi’s words would be my lodestar. I resolved that if I ever reached an advanced age, I would not give up but would keep on. In the meantime I would strive for perfection, even though, as I well knew, it would surely always elude me. (Italics added).

The Second Parallel to Steve Jobs

In his second experience, Drucker elaborates on this quixotic quest for perfection, and goes back in history much past Verdi. If you haven’t read Isaacson’s book yet, many of those who criticise him for a lost opportunity to really help us understand Jobs, point to Isaacson’s not immersing himself in technology history to place Jobs’ development into an appropriate perspective. We read of some clues however (click to enlarge):

The pride in workmanship is perhaps what has differentiated Apple from its competitors in the world of technology. It causes many who don’t understand why some prefer to pay that little extra to be label them as “sheeple” or Apple “Fanbois” or more affectionately within the Apple community as “MacMacs”.

But to drive the point home in the world of presentations, many who attend my workshops “complain” of my work ethic, with respect to labouring for hours over a slide which might only be on the screen for a few moments. Academics in particular claim they do not have the time to invest in their slides, hence their proclivity to “cut and paste” text from Word documents into Powerpoint slides, denude it of verbs and appropriate grammar, and shove a bullet point in front of the text.

I labour over my slides because I make the time to do so; I want the audience to understand I value their attendance and a high quality engaging slideshow is their reward; constructing difficult slides requires me to both understand the message I want to deliver as well as dig down deep into the software I choose to use to really understand its strengths and weaknesses. The latter get reported, with examples of what I want to happen, to Apple’s iWork team.

Finally, a slide or series of slides that work well can be repurposed for another presentation with a simple substituting of words and graphics, keeping the builds and transitions intact.

So what does the back of a cabinet made by Steve Jobs’ father have to do with Peter Drucker?

In his second learning experience to become a knowledge worker, Drucker writes:

THE SECOND EXPERIENCE 
Taught by Phidias

It was at about this same time, and also in Hamburg during my stay as a trainee, that I read a story that conveyed to me what perfection means. It is a story of the greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, Phidias. He was commissioned around 440 b.c. to make the statues that to this day stand on the roof of the Parthenon, in Athens. They are considered among the greatest sculptures of the Western tradition, but when Phidias submitted his bill, the city accountant of Athens refused to pay it. “These statues,” the accountant said, “stand on the roof of the temple, and on the highest hill in Athens. Nobody can see anything but their fronts. Yet you have charged us for sculpting them in the round–that is, for doing their back sides, which nobody can see.”

“You are wrong,” Phidias retorted. “The gods can see them.” I read this, as I remember, shortly after I had listened to Falstaff, and it hit me hard. I have not always lived up to it. I have done many things that I hope the gods will not notice, but I have always known that one has to strive for perfection even if only the gods notice.

Need I say more?

I saw Steve a few times up close when I visited the Apple campus in the last few years, but never had a chance to speak with him. I can certainly fantasise that he many have read some of my blog articles about Apple products such as the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and of course his presentation software of choice, Keynote.

In more recent years, he spoke of hoping to keep Apple’s DNA alive after he was gone by dint of the new Apple building he has commissioned to be built on some previous Hewlett-Packard land. Perhaps he had read of the “Apple DNA” concept on my blog article in December, 2004, a screenshot of which is below. It is on this website that I first suggested Apple ought to make a tablet (I nicknamed it the iScribe) which would be brilliant for Keynote users to remote use:

(If you can find a description of Apple’s DNA earlier than 2004, please let me know!)

I’m sure many readers have fantasised what they would have said to Steve Jobs if they happened to meet him, and perhaps some of you have! My other fantasy includes him walking into my first Presentation Magic  presentation at Macworld 2008, saying  “This sucks!”, then taking over the show to share his presentation ideas. How I and attendees would have had special memories to take with us had that happened!

But before you think it merely fantasy, others in the health professions have indeed been on the receiving end of Jobs’ “advice” with regard to their presentations, especially when they used Powerpoint.

Walter Isaacson’s Jobs’ biography mentions his distaste for Powerpoint, and slideshow-based presentations in general (save for his own keynote presentations) on six occasions. You won’t find Powerpoint or Keynote listed in the book’s index, but in the iBooks’ version I have, you can of course do a global search for keywords. So, here you have them:

Global search of Powerpoint references in "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson

We’ll work our way through some of them because it’s quite illuminating to hear what someone who presentation bloggers and authors rate as one of the world’s best presenters (and the world’s best CEO presenter) has to say about Powerpoint, and presentations in general.

Let’s start with the final reference where Jobs is very ill, and his wife Laurene and others have organised various medical and genetics research staff to investigate where next in his treatment:

One could just imagine Jobs focussing on the expectedly lousy Powerpoint slides of medical researchers while they’re focussing on his genome sequence for which he’s paid $100,000!

But earlier on the book, when Jobs has returned to Apple and is setting about constructing his “A” team to resurrect Apple, we see how he eschews presentations with slideware when he believes it takes from, rather than adds to, the creative process:

“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need Powerpoint”

This might sound strange coming from someone who was the original beta tester for Apple’s Keynote, and who continued to employ it to show Apple’s wares right up to the release of the iPad 2.

But as I have written elsewhere, a Jobs’ keynote does not engage the audience in a dialogue. The audience is engaged with the story he tells of Apple’s products and services, where he employs Keynote like a storyboard, outlining a roadmap. It’s not used as a lecture technology, as an adult training tool, or as a brainstorming of ideas technology. Jobs never hid behind his slides as so many people do, preferring their slides to sell the story. No, Steve emulated for us how the slides were adjuncts to our spoken stories, never getting in the way of what the presenter was saying or doing, but ready to illustrate ideas when words were not enough.

With Steve’s passing who at Apple can carry the torch for Keynote? The obvious answer is Phil Schiller who, after Steve, is most associated with demonstrating iWork in action at Apple keynotes, and showing us updates.

But is Phil invested sufficiently in Keynote to see it continue to be updated with features for a contemporary presentation population, both givers and receivers who have become steadily sophisticated in their expectations.

I say that with some sense of caution however. I was sent a link to YouTube video of several start-ups competing for venture capital, each giving a recent 3 minute presentation.

You can watch it below. But let me remind you that since the release of Lion 10.7 and a point update for Keynote, many in various discussion groups have complained of considerable unhappiness regarding the auto-update feature, which for some means minutes of spinning beach balls for even the slightest of changes to a slide. It has meant on Apple discussion support boards that some have either reverted to Snow Leopard or an earlier edition of Keynote so as to bypass the auto-save feature, or have returned (shudder) to Powerpoint.

So when you watch the video below, bear in mind two things:

1. There is still plenty of room for presentation skills training to judge by the young group of entrepreneurs missing the central point of their presentations, viz.: their failure to appreciate the most important obstacle to overcome as soon as possible is the audience’s fundamental cognition: “Why should I give a $%# about your product?”

2. Feel some empathy for the first presenter, who uses the organiser’s Powerpoint (Mac-based) when it falls over (at 2min56sec):

Notice too what happens when you don’t provide speakers with a vanity monitor, which I have been discussing lately. You’ll see how often the presenters need to look over their shoulder to see what’s happening and lose contact with their audience. Not good when you’ve only got three minutes to persuade people.

You’ll also see many presentation errors with the slides (perhaps I’ll use this as an exercise at my Macworld presentation), which shows I hope that even young, hip entrepreneurs whose presentations really count can so easily be sucked into the Powerpoint vortex of lousy knowledge transfer.

So the mission Steve started in 2003 with Keynote 1.0 is way from over, I believe. Yet the last significant update to Keynote was in 2009 when it moved to version 5, as part of iWork 09, giving us MagicMove (which has become a default Apple transition for their keynotes), some new chart animations, and some remote apps for iDevices.

In two months, it will be three years while its users have patiently waited for Keynote’s multitude of shortcomings to be dealt with in the form of a brand new version, making a significant form and function leap as did Final Cut Pro X.

Yet without Steve there to champion it, as he did in the final period of his life, who within Apple will take it to Tim Cook, hardly renowned so far as a presenter par excellence, and the senior executive team, and offer up an improvement?

Apple keynotes themselves have settled into a very predictable pattern, with incredibly overused build styles, such as the “anvil” whenever amazing financial figures are displayed. In the last few keynotes we have not seen any hints of new effects or styles, although  of course there could be events happening outside of visual awareness, such as the much sought after timeline for more precise animation and build timings.

What’s worse, Apple’s own internal briefings using Keynote which I get to see when my MUG has an official presentation from an Apple rep., are merely Powerpoint converted to Keynote, and I recall conversations with my iWork contact who lamented the generally low level of presentation skills using Keynote performed within Apple’s various divisions. It’s probably why people like me and Larry Lessig were invited to present to the Keynote team, not just to discuss what we wanted in future Keynotes, but for the team to witness how to Present Different.

Prior to the current version 5, the longest time in Keynote’s history  when its users had to patiently wait for a new version was twenty four months, between versions 1 (released January 2003) and 2 (released January 2005).

There were some minor point updates in that time, more for stability than features. Version 2 was a huge improvement, almost like going from OS X 10.1 to its first really useable, put away System 9, version 10.2, Jaguar.

Three years is a very long time, although if one lives in the Windows Powerpoint world, where in the last decade you go from PPT 2003 to 2007 to 2011, it’s not so remarkable. And in the face of continuing updates of significance to the iPad version of Keynote, perhaps not all hope is lost.

But unless we see something new soon, and the current Lion auto-save issue is resolved, I fear issues of abandonment will continue in the face of Apple’s seeming orphaning of what appeared to be one of Steve Job’s favourite applications he loved using himself; one where we watched its use in amazement not just of the products he showed as emblems of Apple’s DNA, at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, but of the “how” he showed them, the likes if which in a CEO we won’t see for a long time.

Vale Steve.

Vale Keynote?

The IDG team has cut back from the many all day workshops of previous years, experimenting with formats for the show, following the cessation of Apple appearing officially at Macworld. Their last was the 2009 Expo, when Phil Schiller headlined the final Apple keynote. Much gloom and doom descended upon Macworld, but the IDG team have risen to the occasion and surprised many who though the show was dead.

IDG has had two years since Apple’s pullout to finesse the show and make it something Apple users will want to attend.

Already I’m hearing chit-chat on various Apple-oriented podcasts casting doubt on how IDG management has decided to move forward. Whatever the case, I feel confident I was selected to present a Premium training workshop due to my previous evaluations and the numbers who’ve attended my sessions since I first appeared at Macworld in 2008 (when Steve Jobs introduced the Macbook Air in his last Macworld keynote which I was fortunate to see).

Here’s the write-up on my one day session on Wednesday January 25, 2012:

WA: Presentation Magic with Keynote
Les Posen, Chief Magician, Presentation Magic
Apple’s Keynote is one of the most loved of Apple’s professional and educational products. While it can be used very simply depending on the presenter’s need, knowledge of presentation skills from both a design and neuroscience background will allow Keynote users to take their presentations to their next level, helping them make outstanding presentations.

This will be a fun, engaging and educative day where Les will do the walk and the talk. Attendees will leave, rushing to their Macs and iPads to make changes to their very next presentation.

Who Should Attend?
Anyone who wishes to reach out to their audiences, whether live or via webcasts, and make a difference to how they learn. Prior knowledge of presentation software will help.

Attendees Will Learn:
The essence of making persuasive audience-oriented presentations, how the brain works when it comes to creating presentations, the power of Keynote to help the message delivery process, tricks and shortcuts to assist learning,  Keynote features often overlooked, answers to many practical presentation issues, deconstruction of slides and presentations that work and don’t work.

(Um… I also authored the abstract so you get some training in persuasive message delivery too!)

If you can’t make the workshop (do recommend it to friends, and perhaps you each can write to me with your particular training needs which you might ask me to cover), I am also doing a 45 minute Keynote-based session the next day as part  of the TechTalk sessions:

TT943: The Magic of Keynote
Les Posen, Chief Magician, Presentation Magic
New users to the Mac platform who bring with them the Powerpoint workflow often merely reproduce Powerpoint’s style with Apple’s Keynote. But Keynote can do so much more because of its advantages, if only users’ minds can be opened to its possibilities. There’s steal magic to be had in using keynote, and Les will demo the kind of Keynote uses that have audience go “Wow”, and then moan they can’t reproduce the effects on the Windows PCs!

With the online training business now worth billions, it’s time to see just what Keynote is capable of doing.

Who Should Attend?
All who wish to present better no matter the audience, and wishes to see Keynote pushed to its boundaries

Attendees Will Learn:
The capabilities of Keynote and presenting when the blinkers are removed!

By the way, it’s been a while since I posted some Presentation Magic and presentation evaluations and feedback, so head over to the Evaluations section here to have a read.

It helps me bring my ideas to paper, to sort them into practical “chunks” so that when I give paid workshops, there’s a place for people to go to investigate more of my ideas and practices. The blog brings me no income, as you can see, containing as it does no Google Adwords or other sources of money, not even a tip-jar.

There’s also an area after each blog entry for readers to both make comments, and to pass on to others the entry link to share around.

So, when I read a blog entry from another presenter which is critical of my endeavours and yet offers no opportunity to respond directly, I have to use my own blog to open up the discussion and see where it takes me and my readership.

Such an event occurred today when my twitter feed showed the following:

Hmm… Something I’ve shown hampers public speaking inadvertently? Well, colour my curiosity piqued!

Heading to the linked website, reveals a blog link on José Silva’s Scrapbook which examines my recent APEX presentation in Seattle which I uploaded to YouTube and blogged about in much detail, describing my choices along the way.

Here’s how José begins his blog entry – and I’m grateful he gets to the point and doesn’t make me wait around too long!

Presentationist Les Posen inadvertently shows why one of the products he recommends is likely to make presenters worse public speakers.

I like Les’s Presentation Magic site (on the internet we’re all on a first name basis, right?). I think it focusses a bit much on presentation sizzle, but then most sites on presentations do. Tufte and Norman, when they discuss presentations, are the exception.

Les gave a presentation about fear of flying where he used a product he recommended before, the iKlip. From the video of that presentation he appears to stay mostly in the same place, standing at parade attention near his stationary iPad.

If he sat down on a comfy chair it would be less distracting; it would at least feel natural.

The iKlip in question is merely a holder for my iPad attached to a microphone stand. It facilitates using the iPad as a vanity monitor so I can best know what’s happening on the main screen behind me without turning my back to the audience.

Previously, I’d either use my Mac in presenter mode – something which means you’ve got to stand within easy sight – or bring with me my own vanity monitor and a switch box so the feed to it and the data projector match. Most conference venues will nowadays supply with you a monitor but it’s expected you’ll use it in mirror mode, something I believe is unhelpful to professional presenters when compared to being in presenter mode, previewing the next build or slide.

The iKlip merely allows me to position the iPad in such a way as to facilitate presenter mode, although because I also use the Doceri software package, I can annotate the slides at will. I’m sure many in education will find that facility very useful, and if one’s running an all day workshop, you could add a white slide to the end of your Keynote or Powerpoint stack, and use Doceri as a whiteboard.

Returning to José‘s critique, he observes something I had not perceived or received feedback from others: that I appear to be standing at “parade attention” due to needing to be in close proximity to the iPad, and this is not good public speaking practice.

Personally, I don’t experience my presentation that way, believing myself to be quite animated using hands, body and voice appropriately. Jose would prefer me to have my iPad in my hands and move around the auditorium, freeing up myself and not appearing so stiff and “unnatural”.

In preparing my response, I was reminded of my training in Family Therapy more than twenty years ago. This therapy developed in response to an increasing medicalisation of behavioural issues, especially in children,  as well as institutionalisation of those with serious mental illness issues.

Rather than seeing a child or adult as being ill, Family Therapy asked therapists to look at the presenting problem in more systemic, global ways, so that the individual was referred to as the “Identified patient” but treatment involved the entire family. The idea was to remove stigmatising and paralysing “blaming of the patient” and look to see how the whole family interacted and to give the family work to do between sessions to ameliorate the “identified” problem behaviour.

This was a radical approach at the time, and required radical interventions. One of these was the Greek Chorus and the one-way screen. Essentially the therapist interacted with the family while a team behind a one-way window observed the family-therapist interaction, using a two-way intercom to call attention to behaviours not necessarily witnessed by the therapist as well as offer questions and observations, hence the Greek Chorus, as it was termed.

Such devices are great for therapists in training, even if it’s a rather nerve wracking experience. Those behind the screen also had much learning to do, sharpening observational skills, formulating hypotheses about what they were witnessing, and providing feedback and guidance to the therapist in the room with the family.

There was one thing though one learnt via this experience: ultimately, the therapist in the room was best placed to “feel” the ambience and mood in that room, something not experienced behind the screen. Whatever advice they received via the intercom, it was their choice as to what they acted upon, sometimes discarding it completely.

Later, in the group debrief, they needed to justify their actions, and the “you had to be in the room” explanation was used sparingly, since it’s hard to put into words the “being with the family” experience.

This is my rebuttal to Jose. What he’s seeing is a video of what happened in the auditorium where the presentation took place. I was there, and responded to the experience as I felt best at the time.

Let me get more to the point, so we may all learn something here.

How I chose to move or not move around the auditorium was determined far less by the iKlip and Doceri than Jose would have it. It was more determined by the practicalities of my audiences. Yes, audiences.

You see, going into this presentation I had in my mind several audiences whose compositions and needs I could only guess at. The first audience was the live one in the room, composed of aviation personnel. As it turned out, they were not a homogeneous group, but came from many areas of aviation. They were seated in a very large room, which held 250 people. The room setup was to place the presenters on a podium, the guest speaker behind a lectern, stage right, and the slideshow way over on stage left.

I was probably the only speaker on the day to get down with the audience, and use Keynote, not Powerpoint. (Many conferences I attend either expect you to bring your own laptop and do all the tech support; or they go completely into control freak mode, and expect you to hand in your Powerpoint which they place on a central server to be played on their supplied PCs.)

So that’s my primary audience which will give one instant feedback as to one’s presentation, and either charge you up or deflate you as you go along.

But I also prepared, when constructing the presentation and its delivery, that I would have at least two other audiences, with quite different learning expectations and priorities…. and these would not be in the live audience to give me instant feedback.

It was my plan to video the presentation and give it to the APEX education committee to place on their private site, for members to watch and download at their leisure. What I was told was that my slides were required for this exercise. And of course I know that if I just sent them just the plain slides without builds and transitions or the accompanying stories, so much would be lost in translation. Of course, being steeped in the cognitive style of Powerpoint (having seen previous APEX slides), their expectation was that my slides would contain all that was needed to convey my story, without my narrative or voice-over. I knew otherwise, so had planned to video my presentation with me on the floor, and cutting in live-action video with my Keynote slides to make it a far more engaging video.

If you go back and view the video on YouTube, you’ll see why I had to limit my movements, so as to stay in camera shot. My iPhone was stationary and set by me to record, with no one to track me as I moved about. Hence, the need not to move out of camera range. That would be fine for the live audience, but the audience watching on YouTube would find it frustrating just to see me move in and out of camera. Here’s Jose himself in action from a camera’s static position, with an hour’s lecture sped up to take just a few minutes (much like we see how Boeing or Airbus assemble a plane in a two minutes.)

Firstly, here’s a screenshot from the video of Jose out of screen range:

This is what I tried NOT to do, and if one of the resultant effects was to come across stiffly, I was prepared to pay the price.

Here’s his YouTube video, and I’m not sure when I watch what is the message behind speeding it up. Note also the hulking and distracting video monitor stand in the centre of the video. Give me my less intrusive iKlip anyday

I mentioned earlier three audiences I was addressing: (1) the live audience, (2) the aviation audience who would watch it on the APEX members-only website, and (3) now a third audience: my own presentation training audience who would watch the video on YouTube where its subject, fear of flying, was merely a vehicle to illustrate my presentation ideas.

For them, how I constructed my slides has always been of interest, but this would be the first time many who had not attended a Presentation Magic workshop would witness me interact with my slides and a live audience, and then read about what and how I did what I did moment by moment. If you can find another presenter who has done this naked work (so to speak) please send me a link so I can put it here and share it.

(This is likely why Jose’s blog entry confused me, focussing as it did on such a small element of my presentation, and making a big deal of something, warning other presenters their’s might be negatively affected.)

I want to focus on a couple more comments Jose made on his blog entry. He asserts I would have come across as more “natural” had I sat in a comfy chair and opined.

Sitting in chairs has the purpose of making a presentation more intimate with strangers. We’ve seen this when the Apple executive team demoed the iPad in keynotes, and more recently, it’s the setup Walt Mossberg took at his and Kara Swisher’s All Things Digital conferences, such as their recent one in Hong Kong.

Here’s Walt and Al Gore in conversation in front of hundreds of high powered Asia-based tech executives:

So sitting down has its place in public speaking in order to create an intimate dialogue when in front of a rather formidable audience or in a friendly small setting, because you want to create a special feeling in the room.

In my presentation at APEX, I was not interested in an intimate dialogue. I was challenged with 30 minutes to convince three audiences of the worthiness of my ideas, and my authority and authenticity in at least two fields: aviation and public speaking. It was not a time for intimacy.

Let me finish this critique of Jorge’s critique with his final words:

For me, Doceri won’t help. I use either a real teleprompter, the eyes-only presenter screen on large monitors at the ten-and-two positions on the floor, or — overwhelmingly — good memory supplemented by notes.

This is all well and good if you are repeating lectures in a familiar environment. But if you’re a public speaker as I am, most often – actually invariably – you are not given these tools Jose relies upon. So, I have to be inventive and the iPad, Doceri and the iKlip take me a long way to being self-sufficient as a presenter while hopefully delivering high quality presentations to diverse audiences on diverse subjects in diverse and sometimes hostile locations.

I appreciate the value of a great memory (which is why I rehearse so much as its an aide memoire), as are notes as long as they don’t interfere with you connecting to the audience.

But I fear that there is only so much of a rapprochement possible here. Focussing on such a small component of what I think is a rather complex, multilevel presentation with numerous audiences in mind doesn’t give me a sense of optimism.

Your comments are welcomed.

This is especially so in the USA, where commercial aviation remains vigilant about repeat events, while trying to make travelling by airliner as comfortable and pleasant as possible, in the current circumstances. It’s not an easy ask, but technology appears to be coming to the rescue, up to a point, by its introduction to the cabin environment of everyday technologies, such as wifi, iPads and other sources of entertainment to while away the hours. It’s as if a return to the fun days of commercial aviation is possible, before the introduction of budget airlines and tight security.

I had such issues in mind when I constructed my presentation on fear of flying for aviation personnel for the APEX conference , which I delivered at the convention, September 12.

As my previous blog entry describes, I was the first of three to speak in the late afternoon session, which allowed me to set up my equipment during the coffee break.

This included setting my iPhone 4 on a nearby table so as to video record my presentation for later editing.

That’s now complete, and the result is on my page on YouTube.

Now I get many notes in the evaluations of my Presentation Magic workshops, or indeed any presentation I do using my presentation magic “style”asking how and why I did what I did.

So, I decided I would do a Director’s Cut version of my APEX presentation here on this blog. Those in the aviation industry who watch the video will likely not be interested in the same things as presenters wishing to learn more of my presentation concepts, so it’s here in this blog where I’ll ask you to follow along.

You can do this in one of two ways:

1. Just watch the video through from beginning to end (it’s roughly 38 mins) and let it wash over you as if you are a member of the intended audience.

2. Or, you can open it in a separate window and keep this page open as I take you through each element on a timed basis, using the time elapsed in the YouTube video as the key.

3. Or you could do 1, then 2, and see the video twice. Hence, the reason for calling it the Director’s Cut, as is done with DVDs with its extra tracks.

How was the video constructed

One of the missing elements in the current edition of Keynote 09 is a timeline, an easy way to edit resultant videos so as to play as a standalone video or on a service like YouTube. When it exports it as a video, Keynote either allows the viewer to manually advance each element of the video, or it allows for a fixed timing for each build and slide. This has its uses but not with the video I wish to show you.

For this, I had to step away from Keynote and use an editing software. I could have used iMovie or Final Cut, but instead I chose software which I find more intuitive and that’s ScreenFlow 3 from Telestream, the same people who provide Flip4Mac to allow viewing of .wmv movies on Macs seamlessly.

Intended initially to help software developers make videos of to show users how to best employ their apps by showing the workflow on the screen, I find it has applications to help make up for Keynote’s shortcomings.

The Workflow

To record my presentation, I simply placed the iPhone on its edge, having made sure the camera captured the physical area in which I would be presenting. I switched it on as the session started, then moved into frame for the introductions.

At the conclusion of my presentation, I synched the iPhone with my Macbook Pro, at which time the 3GB or so video was imported into iPhoto.

From there it could be dragged into the ScreenFlow 3 timeline, where the audio and video tracks were separated. I needed to do this because my Keynote file also contained movies with sound which needed to be mixed with the live sound so as to capture the audience reaction to what I was showing.

My intention was to cut back and forth between the live presentation featuring me centre stage with the projected images behind me (see below), and the movie of my Keynote file, once it was exported in Quicktime format.

Here

All things considered, the Quicktime output does a good job of preserving the embedded video files and maintains the sharpness of the fonts, pictures and build styles and transitions, as long as you don’t overuse compression protocols. I actually allowed the Quicktime movie to be in DV-PAL format despite the resultant size, which was then imported into ScreenFlow 3. The resultant file was more than 4GB.

I could have extracted the audio and video from this Quicktime file, which woud have left two audio and and two video files. This is not the sort of production I do everyday and I wanted it up on YouTube quickly, so I left the Keynote video intact, with both audio and video. In future efforts, I may change the workflow and separate the tracks, but the issue of keeping all the material synchronised is a serious challenge.

The decision one needs to make in producing this kind of video is when to cut away from the live presentation to the Keynote presentation and when to cut back. It needs to be done smoothly with consideration given to any transition styles, just as one would with Keynote or Powerpoint.

Up to a point, the decision is made for you. At the beginning, you have your opening slide where you’re being introduced, then cut to you making your opening statements with the same opening slide behind you, then cut to the slideshow again once the first slide makes its appearance.

It’s actually not quite as easy as it sounds as I wanted to use some of ScreenFlow’s built in transitions to make the appearance a little easier on the eye, rather than just cut back and forth. This means careful timing so as not to cause a disjuncture or rupture of the sequence, nor loss of information on the Keynote builds I used.

Let’s just say that it required quite a few “undo-redo” commands before I was happy with the outcome. This wasn’t easy, since the more small Quicktime movie files built up (rather than two long videos), the more ScreenFlow began to act flakily, crashing frequently, something I am still working with its helpdesk team to resolve. In essence I had scores of small Quicktime movies from both the Keynote video and the iPhone video littering the timeline, and it’s likely these choked ScreenFlow. Trouble was, rather than falling over early in the export of what I thought was the finished product, it fell over right at the end, often after a half hour of processing, only to have me start again. Very frustrating.

In the end, I firstly exported the Screenflow audio track only, then the video only using Voila’s Screencasting ability. The irony here is I had to use a screenmovie (Voila) of a screenmovie (ScreenFlow 3) to achieve the final product! I then used Quicktime Pro to bring video and audio together in synchrony.

So, let’s go to the YouTube video now, and I’ll walk you through a timeline of what, how and why I did what I did, including errors which I would correct if I gave the presentation again. This way we all learn.

00.00: This is the slide I created by using the brand slide I was asked to use throughout my presentation by APEX management. I used it only once, because it made no sense to use it elsewhere. I saw some other presenters staying with it, but then others merely used their own presentation stacks which they had clearly used for other conferences or sales meetings.

While I’m being introduced by a member of the APEX Education Committee, I’m actually fiddling around with the Macbook Pro on the ground, tweaking a few things. I left this out of the video

00:27 I use one of ScreenFlow’s transitions to open the live video coverage. I had positioned my iPhone so as to capture a fairly wide shot yet with me in the centre, with the screen behind my left shoulder. I actually placed some marks on the floor so as to remember where I ought to stand most of the time, especially when I played videos and needed to be out of shot temporarily.

If you look at the first time I’m shown, you’ll see my Macbook Pro on the ground infront of me (it has an Incipio black cover so as to not draw attention to the Apple logo. If people think I’m using Powerpoint to achieve my effects because it looks like I’m using a Lenovo or Dell laptop, all the better!).

Also, you’ll notice my iPad sitting in landscape mode in an iKlip holder attached to a music stand. This is my vanity monitor setup, with Doceri software allowing me to see what’s on the screen behind me, and to go into presentation mode at the tap of a button on the iPad screen. In my right hand, is my Kensington remote for controlling the Keynote show.

00:46 At this point, having read the bio I had supplied her, the session moderator asks this aviation audience if anyone has a fear of flying. To her and my surprise, quite a few hands go up, and I’m already thinking ahead about my content and if it will need any alterations on the fly given the audience composition.

I thank the host, and launch into one of three different introductions I had rehearsed, depending on the size and composition of the audience, as well as the tone set by the moderator. I rehearsed these out aloud in my hotel room to hear what sounds good, and to make sure the words come out clearly, given the audience might be surprised at my Australian accent. This is especially the case as the audience was a very mixed one culturally, a point I’ll come back to later on when I discuss a potential faux pas I made.

Notice how the brightness of the screen behind me washes out much of the slide due to the iPhone 4′s mediocre camera quality, hopefully improved in the iPhone4s, just released. This is why it was necessary to edit in the actual slides from Keynote.

01:12 An unrehearsed element here, where I acknowledge the number in the audience who have identified as having a fear of flying. It’s possible I might call on them later in the session to discuss some of my ideas in a workshop style, but frankly time is so tight (I have 30 minutes allotted to me) it’s unlikely.

01:17 At this point I launch into my prepared and rehearsed presentation with accompanying slides. Because fear of flying is an almost undiscussable in the aviation community, especially this one which is about the positive passenger experience, I knew I had to make the subject palatable rather than scholarly. An academic presentation would be for a different audience. This audience needed to be convinced it was a worthwhile topic, and that if they understood it, there could be financial gain for them.

So I started off by taking a one-down position, making fun of myself for having chosen potentially the wrong profession to be in, by focussing on two times in history when fear of flying was not at all unusual, and thus not requiring the services of a clinical psychologist.

As you’ll hear, the first was during the barnstorming days in early aviation when it really wasn’t that safe to fly.

01:37 I needed to get this group onside very quickly given their expected defensiveness, and so early on I introduced a visual joke, using aviation terminology to catch the audience off guard: “If you were offered a seat on the wing, they really meant it!”

This generated a little laughter, as if the audience wasn’t sure if they were meant to laugh at such a serious, academic and potentially dry subject, but as they got into the talk, you can hear how they loosened up, hopefully with me giving them permission to have a chuckle. This is part of the engagement process, keeping your audience expecting more fun or surprises ahead.

01:49 Note how the picture of the wingwalker is framed like an old photo album, using one of Keynote’s border features including album corners. You’ll see the picture dissolve into full colour, because it’s actually a very modern photo. I had tried to find an original photo from the barnstorming days, but failing that I located a modern one, and using an effect from software called FX Photostudio Pro (which came with one of the recent Mac software bundles), I used a supplied filter to give it an aged look.

The use of a fullscreen, high-res photo which then dissolves into a full colour image gives the audience an immediate sense that this is not your usual Powerpoint. It keeps me central as the main generator of words and ideas, and informs the audience from the get-go that this will be a highly visual presentation, accompanied by my commentary.

I do this in almost all the presentations I give no matter what the subject. Those opening moments are crucial in setting the mood and expectations for what is to follow in the next 30 minutes.

02:00 At this point, I head into some rehearsed storytelling, attempting to establish the long history of treating fear of flying, starting with the first flight attendants, who were in fact, nurses. This likely comes as a surprise to many in the audience, and I personalise the story by focussing on a groups of flight attendants (FA), and at…

02:07… I single out Ellen Church as the first FA and tell a little of her story. Note please how I do NOT use a laser pointer to locate her on the slide. I dissolve to a second slide – a duplicate of the first – but where the second slide is altered in both sharpness and contrast, leaving a cut out of the subject in high contrast so the eye is drawn there. I also use a shadow effect to outline her with a glow so as to be absolutely sure where your attention goes. I believe it’s important early in a presentation to have these effects to train your audience to expect their attention to be directed by the story you are telling.

How I actually created this effect in Keynote is interesting. I used Keynote’s “Mask with shape” feature to create the cutout of the subject from the first slide which was then pasted into the second slide, and the two slides are then dissolved. To the audience it appears as if the subject has materialised from the slide, which is the intended effect, and they are oblivious to the fact two slides were used. This is not easy to achieve in Powerpoint, because its “dissolve” transitions do not come close to Keynote’s underutilised and underestimated “dissolve”.

02:30 I continue to establish the story of FAs and their initial employment to help nervous flyers, thus establishing that fear of flying is as old as flying itself, and thus there is a body of knowledge about the subject. However, I still need to make the connection to current understandings of fear of flying, and why it is still a relevant subject in 2011, despite the vast improvements in aviation safety and comfort.

03:10 The slide has been on the screen for long enough, so it’s time to give the audience more things to please the eye and ear, yet remain true to the story I’m telling. At this point, I introduce the audience to a new ABC TV show which is due to start in two weeks from my presentation (September 25) called, PAN AM, based on the defunct airline during its halcyon days in the 1960s, when commercial aviation was still glamorous and exotic.

With the video I am hoping to hit the audience with some emotion – nostalgia for the “good ol’ days” – and at the same time, demonstrate Keynote’s seamless segue to video, something those using older versions of Powerpoint struggle with. Note at…

03:13… my choice of transition, the droplet, to convey a change in time, much like you see in movie dream sequences, or when directors wish to convey a memory or scene change an actor is experiencing. What you see and hear is the video of the exported Quicktime of my Keynote file, with no resolution loss at all.

03:37 The edit here is a bit too sudden, when the actress says, “You’re famous now”, and if I were to re-edit the movie, I would soften the transition.

04:04 I am back centre stage to bring my first point home: the notion of there being a time when it was normal to have a fear of flying, because indeed it was a risky time to fly, and not at all irrational, thus not requiring the services of a clinical psychologist.

At this point, I remind the audience I earlier mentioned there being two times when it was normal to be fearful of flying, and now I’m about to introduce the second and more contemporary time, which has direct relevance to the date on which I’m presenting.

04:09 I wanted to talk about the second time being post 9/11, and how companies refused to let their senior staff fly rather than drive to business appointment if they were less than 500 miles away. I needed to find a visual to represent 9/11, and did not want to show the audience of aviation personnel images of crashing planes. For all I know, they may have known victims on board the aircraft involved, and I needed to be respectful of this. The image I used contained elements of patriotism for whom I assumed would be a mainly American audience, as well as showing the WTC towers intact. As it turned out the audience was very mixed in terms of nationalities, and the patriotic image was likely unnecessary.

04:20 I surprise the audience with stories that the fear of flying business suffered after 9/11 because no one thought it strange to not want to fly in the months after.

04:27 I bring in these New Yorker magazine covers (September 24th edition) to break the previous image being on the screen too long. I created these two magazines from a single cover from a gathering of some of the best magazine covers ever which I have stored in iPhoto. I used BoxShot3D to create them, and I used the same software for some of the book images I produce later in the presentation. (I probably bring the New Yorker image in to the YouTube presentation a little too early as it seems to just hang there until I make direct reference to it at 04:45)

04:52 Having said the New Yorker cover captures the feelings of New Yorkers, I attempt to justify this assertion by telling of my time in NYC just a few days before 9/11, then tie it in to another aviation event, the collapse of Australian airline, Ansett, to whom I consulted on fear of flying. You’ll thus note that while some of the story elements seem disconnected at first, I try and pull them together with connecting elements, like my own story and memories.

05:22 After telling a personal and unrehearsed story, I return to the main story which is to show at this point that the unnecessary fears over flying post 9/11 had real consequences, and indeed tap into current fears which see people preferring to drive rather than fly despite the available safety statistics. Many people hear these statistics frequently and ignore them, but I chose a particularly interesting study (2009) which shows how driving fatalities increased significantly in the months after 9/11, ostensibly because people drove when they previously would have flown.

05:31 Notice how I display the actual article itself, located from the web, and brought in as a screenshot. I duplicated it twice more, and sent each duplicate behind the other with a shadow outline to convey it was a multipage article and lift it off the screen a little.

While the body of the article contains almost unreadable text, the article title is very clear and legible.

05:33 I needed to make my point very quickly and directly, so lifted out the main talking point using a screen shot to create a “call out” using a scaling build in Keynote. Notice how I once more fade the actual article so as to direct attention to the main point. This too was done using two duplicate slides, with the build-in set to appear automatically after the transition.

Notice too how the enlarged quote ends on the third line with the word “about”.

In fact, the line continues but I wanted the words that appear there to have greater impact. So I took another screenshot of them, and covered them in the original call out with a white shape, then built in the second call out at…

05:51 …to make my main point, that driving is still a more dangerous proposition than flying, and here’s the evidence. The other thing to note is that the only time I ever read a slide to an audience is if

1. I am reading a direct quote from pictured source,

2. The presentation is being recorded and it’s possible the viewing audience will see the slide on a poor resolution monitor so it helps to read it,

3. The auditorium is very big, and those at the back will be challenged to see even large font words.

06:15 I now return with the audience to a current understanding of fear of flying and why those in the aviation industry need to understand it more. I do it by reviewing a seminal 1982 research paper (displayed) produced for the Boeing Corporation, a major presence at APEX whose executives had presented in the morning educational sessions, along with rival Airbus.

Once more, I don’t just cite it, but show it, something which required some effort to track down, having long ago lost my original signed copy given to me by one of those mentioned in the article, Dr. Al Forgione of Boston, one of the first to run fear of flying group programs in the USA.

06:37 If my memory serves me correctly, it was Al Forgione who suggested the then CEO of Boeing, Bill Allen (not Paul Allen whom I mistakenly named in the video) wanted to know more about the subject for personal reasons, not just commercial ones.

06:53 “The most telling part of the report”. At this point, I have once more duplicated the slide, enlarged and relocated the image, and used Keynote’s Magic Move transition to give a Ken Burns’-like movement to the slide. One could do this with a move and scale build on the o
ne slide (which is how Powerpoint users would achieve a similar result) but Magic Move makes it so much easier.

06:55 I draw more attention to the telling part – the memorable part of the slide which sells why knowing about fear of flying is important for this audience – by redlining the numbers in the USA afraid to fly in 1978 when the research was conducted.

07:05 I use a page flip transition to go to another page of the article (note how I use a cut edge and shadow effect) and then draw out once more the main point on this page at…

07:09 where another screenshot lifts off the page, once more larger and shadowed to give it some depth. This is about as big a scale as I could achieve without the text becoming blurred to the point of distraction. Had it been diffcult to achieve, I would have created the same effect but using Keynote’s fonts to match as close as possible those in the original document, then fuzzed them a little so it appeared they came off the same page.

These are the little things that can consume time and effort but which differentiates run of the mill presentations from ones audiences remember.

07:44 More significant points being made, and note that as I say the point the action takes place, in this case an enlarging header. This congruity between what the audience sees and what they hear can help differentiate so-so presenters from professionals, even if I say so myself! By the way, when I attempt this congruity which requires practice saying it and using your remote, I do so in a way the audience cannot see the remote in action. It’s as if my words are causing the call out to take place. Don’t give away your powers of verbal persuasion by thrusting the remote at the computer as if it’s doing the slide transition – this will disempower you in front of the audience. This co-ordination is hard to do – just witness any Apple keynote and watch how the Senior VPs handle it. But practice will help you achieve a truly professional appearance.

07:47 I use a red underline rather than a scaling call out, for a change of pace and because there’s much to read and I want the audience to follow me along in my idea sharing. Note once more when I get to…

07:59… the words “revenue loss of….” ends in a blank area. Indeed, the number $1,600,000,000 is present but I wanted this number to have maximum impact so rather than letting the audience read it before I got to it (audiences will always read your slide faster than you can speak it so you lose congruity, as discussed above), I covered it up once more with a white shape, and brought in the number with an Anvil build at…

08:00 Again, notice the congruity between what I say and the appearance of this extraordinary number, thus accentuating its importance. Subtle but effective. Notice too that I give the numbers a little shadow effect to lift them off the screen, as if to bring it closer to the audience, and give it more salience.

08:07 When I cut back to the live video, you can see just how effective the number is on the screen behind me, so you can guess the impact it would have had on the live audience when it appeared. Given the ubiquity of Powerpoint in aviation (actually Microsoft products in general) this would have been the first time many in the audience would have seen the anvil effect, unless they watch lots of Apple keynotes!

08:12 Notice in this little section here how I use my arms to further convey changes, up and down. Standing behind a lectern, it would look pretty silly doing this but out in the open space on the same level as the audience allows more dramatic and congruent gestures.

08:52 I now wish to draw more attention to the 1982 study’s conclusion which I believe to be of relevance to the group, and so display three essential points. I could have done these in summary format using bullet points, but that would be very ordinary. Instead, I use cut outs from the actual document and speak directly to the points.

09:17 Notice how I use Doceri on the iPad to display to myself the item which appears on the screen behind me. This allows me to face the audience rather than turning my back on them to read from the large screen.

10:14 I start reading accurately then get my message mixed up here. This third element is about loyalty and how one successful flyer can influence others to fly with the same airline, and I end up reversing this to speak about not flying. I’m not sure how I came to do this, and it could be something of a “disconnect” but no one puts their hand up to point out the discrepancy between what I’m saying and what the text actually says. I made the same point in the previous callout, so I’m guessing I wanted to elaborate the point in another fashion.

10:45 Another important article reference, this time highlighted by a redbox appearing around the “money quote” which I read.

11:19 After exhorting this aviation audience to see themselves as part of a therapeutic community helping anxious flyers make a better go of it, I then turn my attention and that of the audience to how the aviation industry in recent times has been researching fear of flying. There are many transitions I could have used, but I often use this one to introduce a new concept or a shift of ideas. Both the old and the new ideas appear together momentarily with the old giving way to the new.

11:23 This next sequence, using a world map to display three recent conferences, is overkill perhaps, but once more it’s an engaging way of demonstrating concepts of time and location, and was created using iMovie 11 which allows you to plug in locations and it will animate a line joining them. The animation is exported as a Quicktime movie then text added in Keynote. In fact there are two movies here, joined seamlessly in Keynote, with added graphics for good measure. I wanted the audience to see one of the roof bodies of commercial aviation, ICAO – an entity of the United Nations – had sponsored the most recent 2007 convention, in an effort to add gravitas.

12:00 A motion dissolve transition moves the audience from a globe to a book which was the conference proceedings of the 2000 convention. Once more, this started out as a flat image from Amazon.com, which Boxshot3D then enabled me to create a 3D book effect. I used some of the cover to create screenshots of the binder edge titles. If I attend Macworld in 2012, I’ll show how to do this great image creation, which I believe makes for a more engaging slide than merely a text-based slide.

12:10 I needed to draw out three important points from the book, so used MagicMove to draw the book out to the left, leaving room to make the points in fairly large text. Notice how I bring the points in one at a time, and no more than three on the one slide. This is very important.

12:46 I show a new Boeing 747-8 in preparation for dividing it into thirds to discuss some important statistics about fear of flying. It’s perhaps a little too early to show the plane as I firstly discuss psychotherapy in general, but it’s not a huge error. I’d do it a little differently the next time.

13:03 Now I apply the rule of thirds I’ve mentioned about therapy in general to airline travel, and so shade the aircraft image using Keynote’s image adjust panel.

13:15 I look to the audience and using my hand to mirror agreement, ask who belongs in the category of loving flying no matter what. It’s just another more active example of being with the audience and keeping them engaged.

13:19 More shading effects to draw out my next point.

14:13 We’re getting – at half way through my allotted time – to the issues many in the audience really want to hear about: What’s fear of flying about?

So I divide the concept into two areas, external – what the plane brings to passengers, and internal, what passengers bring to the flying experience. There are numerous causations, which I have mentioned by referring in a previous slide to the heterogeneous nature of this fear (no one size fits all) and now it’s time to become more specific.

I could use images for the next section, but instead decided with the time available to use text instead.

14:31 Notice how when I bring in the text, I use a different colour than the header so as to make clear which is header and which is an element. Once more, no need to use bullet points to clutter the slide.

15:11 I’m bringing in subsections of subsections now, but notice that because of my timing of text and sound and my use of indentation, there is once more no need to use bullets or hyphens to clutter the slide. I like my slides clean and crisp. It takes some practice with your remote to time the builds to match your voice. Notice how I keep the remote action as invisible as possible for the audience, and I add to this by using both hands to make my points.

17:23 C level refers to “Chief” as in CEO, COO, CIO, CFO etc.

17:39 I needed to make one further but more difficult to grasp point, so inserted a Boeing screenmovie at this point. We’re on board the same 747 type I used in the previous slide, and the camera moves through the cabin towards a sliding panel in First Class which houses a liquor bar. Notice the flowerpots in front of the panel to the right of the picture at…

17:53.. when once more I use MagicMove and a still shot on a second slide to focus on this panel, which looks like a curtain.

18:03 We now see the screen more closely,and I use this to speak of the older, psychodynamic concept of projection, which is a classical Freudian defense against unwanted anxiety. It’s not very behavioural, which is how I tend to think of fear of flying, but it has its place in treatment of certain presentations of anxiety, as you’re about to hear.

18:10 I use a slow dissolve to bring in a set of blue curtains which is a third party Quicktime movie which I have sized to match the curtains on the plane. Notice that the blue curtains appear behind the now rather unfocussed flower jars. It’s subtle and not meant to be noticed, but this took quite some time to do as I had to create another “Mask with Shape” cut out to have the blue curtains appear behind the flowers.

18:20 I offer an everyday example of projection using an unhappy computer experience, and because we’re in Seattle, I point to Redmond, the location of Microsoft, to blame when PCs go bad; a little nerd in-joke.

18:42 The mystery of why the curtains turned blue is now revealed, as they part and an image appears, the first being that of a rather exotic wedding couple.

19:01 I now give several examples with images of a variety of anxiety-laden life situations to which an aircraft may transport you, and thus an association can occur between the two.

In order to illustrate a fairly common presentation, I now show an actual email I received just a few days before my talk. It occurs at…

19:45… after I use the Blind transition. Something interesting now occurs. I read the email as it’s written to the audience, having obscured the author’s email address and name. So far, so good. But when it came to placing it on YouTube, I had second thoughts and wanted to obscure identifying details of the email, without losing the gist of it. So I re-recorded my reading of the email, and altered the email itself by changing locations and certain events to further protect the writer’s identity.

19:59 You can hear the change of sound quality at this point as I read the email, then cut back again to the live audio.

21:00 Nothing more needs to be added to the email, and I wanted now to offer an even more engaging illustration of a fearful flyer, and so used a brief section of a video called “This Emotional Life” from the PBS network, which I actually use with my patients.

22:10 I used this clip to try and help the audience move away from their possible preconceived notion that fear of flying is all about planes crashing, when for the vast majority that’s not where the action is.

22:52 I now want to focus on concepts of fear and differentiate it from anxiety, and move into some of the biological aspects of the subject, which I believed might be a bit of a stretch for my audience. Thus it required something of a “setup”, as a comedian might describe a joke, to prepare the audience for the more challenging concepts to come.

22:48 A straightforward build-in of the word, FEAR. What you can’t see is that I have placed on top of each letter an individual letter F…E…A…R. This is because I’m setting up the next MagicMove transition which occurs at…

22:51 The setup here is to explore a commonly used, but false acronym, using the letters, F.E.A.R. I use a recent TV show to further illustrate my point of how frequently this concept is used. This appeals to the concept of authenticity, where I show evidence for my assertions.

23:01 This very short sequence is from the recent TV series, Necessary Roughness, featuring the work of a fictional performance psychologist.

23:12 In order to deconstruct this acronym, I literally do so using one of Keynote’s new builds, used to devastating effect when Steve Jobs (z”l) first demonstrated the uselessness of netbooks when compared to his about to be unveiled iPad in January 2010 (see below)

23:26 I use the anagram build to go from WRONG to What if

23:41 … and further use the anagram to play on the words again, to go from what if to what now, so as to more fully appreciate the nature of anxiety.

23:51 This is a Quicktime movie from a History Channel documentary of 2008 called The Brain, and at various points I cause it to loop while I explain various important concepts, the most important being the brain has older and new components due to our evolution. Sometimes those older components overwhelm the new parts where language and decision-making reside, and so rational thought can fly out the window under certain conditions, with very old routines, like flight, freeze and fight taking precedence.

24:38 Because so much action is taking place on the big screen and complicated concepts are on show, I break my usual rule of not looking at the screen to explain what’s happening.

25:10 Having spent a few moments engaged in some of the science of anxiety, it’s time to turn these ideas into treatment strategies, and so we return to the book I referred to earlier, and extract the treatment gold standards.

25:19 I break lots of rules here by putting up lots of words and ideas. I don’t like doing this in front of a live audience, then rushing through them. Not a good idea. But I also knew the presentation in some format was to be placed on the APEX members’ website for later viewing, and so I wanted these ideas to be seen in their entirety. In this case, my intended audience was not the live one in front of me, but the unknown APEX members who might refer to this presentation over the next few months, or even years.

26:19 After going through the points very quickly, it’s time to get to the meat and potatoes section of the presentation: Why Aviation needs to better understand fear of flying and learn what to do about it, in order to improve its bottom line. Rather than hit the audience over the head with this idea (some presenters might be bolder and do just that, but by now you’ll see I prefer a more subtle approach in my persuasive story telling), I bring the audience’s attention to New Challenges.

26:38 I look down at the Mac and note I have about 7 minutes to go and I have prepared a funny segment from comedian Louis C.K. about the perils of modern flying which is 5 minutes long. For a moment, I contemplate skipping it entirely, and so finish early, but then the thought hits me that the video is so much fun it would be a great way to go out on. In hindsight, it might have been better to put this video in much earlier, perhaps a few slides after the section on 9/11 and PAN AM to highlight how much of the fun of flying has left us, which this vignette captures brilliantly. As it is, the video is heavily edited, and I’ll show you when and how in the next section. I probably could have edited it even further and reduced it to 3.5 minutes, perhaps next time. Note too how I forewarn the audience they may become anxious watching the video, which no doubt piques their interest and keeps them watching to learn why.

28:42 Notice how I embed the Quicktime movie of Louis C.K. (it’s episode 5) in a TV set (complete with original AppleTV) to let the audience know they’re watching a TV show. It also lets me keep the video small, as any bigger it would poorly display with lots of pixelation. Note too that as the movie progresses, there is an audible echo. This is because I wanted to keep the live audience reactions along with the embedded sound in the movie, but as it went along the synchronisation badly fell over. With my haste to get it up on YouTube, I let this go, but in the future it would require a different approach to maintain synchrony.

27:38 Look closely here and you’ll see an edit. This is because Louis C.K. asks why his just purchased flight was cancelled. In actuality., the checkin crewmember tells him the plane which was doing that flight has crashed with no survivors other than a small baby. I thought it best not to include this in a presentation to aviation personnel. Bad taste.

28:28 This next sequence where the TSA officials question Louis about his carryon “lube” is one of the funniest yet unpredictable parts of the vignette. It’s a high risk segment as not everyone is comfortable with public discussion of sexual material, especially in relation to masturbation. It’s also high risk because of cultural prohibitions that might have been in place with an international audience who could easily be offended and complain to APEX. So far, I’ve not received any nasty feedback.

29:46 “Let him keep it”, says the TSA supervisor in reference to the lube, and this gets a huge laugh from the audience. This is one of the reasons I kept the laugh track in rather than just the audio from the Quicktime movie. (I felt like Bill Prady, producer of The Big Bang Theory, who swears on Twitter the show’s live audience really does laugh and the show doesn’t need a canned laughter track added. Now you have evidence why a real audience’s reactions are great to have!)

29:59-30:35 This getting to your seat on a small plane is kinda fun, but at the end of the day I could have cut it, and nothing would have been lost. The next fun part which highlights new challenges to modern aviation comes when Louis’ seat companion joins him…

30:55 At this point, I’m looking at the audience as I do usually when I play movies, gauging their reaction, having seen the video many times by now. I notice the APEX committee member who introduced me gesticulating to her committee chairman to get his head out of the papers in front of him, and look at the video. It turns out he is as big as Louis’ seat companion, and she wants to mess with him at little!

31:05 Once more I probably could have stopped the video here and moved to my concluding slides and shaved another minute. Not sure why I didn’t as the point of showing the video has been well and truly made. Again, this is the sort of thing you go over in your own personal post-presenmtation debrief to see what worked and what didn’t. As someone once said to me and I pass it on here and in most Presentation Magic workshops, you always give three presentations:

1. The one you planned to give

2. The one you actually gave

3. and the one you wished you’d given.

It’s at (3) when you debrief yourself that you become your own harshest critic and honestly assess what you could have done better or differently, and actually make changes to your presentation to reflect these considerations.

32:35 I go back to live video and connect the Louis C.K. video with one of the points I made earlier, how even good tempered flyers can find themselves avoiding the discomfort of modern flying, and thus setting themselves up for a fear of flying problem

32:43 We’re coming to the end of the talk and there are some final acts of persuasion to perform. So we turn a new leaf, so to speak with the flop transition to reveal New Challenges.

32:48 A little surprise here as a I refer to challenges like dress codes using the drift build which bring an image in offscreen, pauses it for a moment mid-screen, then screeches off the slide to the right. Blink, and you might miss it. Dropping in little surprises like this helps the engagement, as long as it’s relevant and not overdone or in poor taste. This one got a good laugh, fortunately.

32:58 I refer to New Challenges as in fact New Opportunities and use the Anagram build to make the transition.

33:04 At this point I could probably truly finish and bring the show home. But the audience is enjoying themselves and I will be only two minutes overtime. What you don’t see and hear because I edited it out is my asking the next presenter if I can have two more minutes, which is really his time. This is really stretching a friendship, and he would have every right to say no. But he enjoyed the presentation too, and so allowed me to continue. If my presentation had been dull and boring, he or the moderator would likely have pulled the plug.

So I show a few slides from a colleague, noting they’re not my slides obviously (a little naughty of me) which show airlines and their sponsorship of fear of flying courses. This is setting up for a new venture I’m involved in which I will soon mention to wrap things up, without appearing too commercial.

33:14 I turn my attention to low cost airlines who are not interested in fear of flying courses as they offer no immediate return on investment, especially given the trend now to “nickel and dime” passengers by charging for every little aspect of flying, from luggage to seat choice to priority boarding, etc.

33:18 This Mosaic transition took quite some time to develop, as I was trying to work out just how Keynote laid out the rotating squares, and then place a picture of a low-cost airline right on the square. In order to do so, I first laid out a grid of yellow horizontal and vertical lines to see the dimensions of the revolving elements, and used Screenflow to take a screen movie which I could slow down and measure.

I think you’ll agree it’s quite an effective transition which lasts only a few seconds, whereas to set it up probably took the best part of an hour. But the thing is, with a lot of the effects I create, the first time is always the most laborious, then one can use it as a template for future presentations, simply substituting different images relevant to the next presentation.

33:26 The Mosaic image is continued to reveal one image, where my point is that the last refuge of the fearful flyer – it’s too expensive to fly compared to other transport – is no longer tenable. The words Now Everyone Can Fly are clearly visible, but at…

33:27 ..while I say the words, I bring them from the rear aircraft to the fuselage of the front one to drive the point home. Perhaps an unnecessary effect, but again a little surprise to keep the audience engaged as the presentation draws to a close.

33:34 It’s time to reward the audience’s attention with a little more humour about low cost airlines, so with a Cube transition, I bring in the forward section of a 737 which has been painted to highlight “Flying 101″, to provide an education for fearful flyers. Notice how I pause while waiting for the audience to catch up with me and actually read the writing on the aircraft. A second cube transition helps move to the rear of the fuselage at…

33:42.. where in fact a second picture gives the impression it’s actually one picture. In fact, it took some work to enlarge and add some foreground and sky screenshots to maintain the illusion. If you stop the video at…

33:43.. you’ll see just how different the images are, but with the Cube transition the eye is not quick enough to see the single image doesn’t add up, as shown below:

33:46 Using MagicMove once more, I focus in on the “mile high club initiation chamber” – the loo – which brings a laugh.

33:57 As I wrap up, I want to remind the audience that fearful flyers don’t like too much choice as it can cause paralysis by analysis and so I quickly show a screencast of me booking a flight for a patient, and how the budget airline keeps throwing up hurdles I must leap over just to get the booking done, from offers of accommodation and car hire, to carbon offsetting, through to priority boarding etc.

34:33 I now want to remind the audience that we are together in the customer focus business and so I need a model to emphasise this. Who better to model how to delight customers than Steve Jobs, who, alive at the time, had authorised this forthcoming book (due next week) to be published. Once more, I created this from a flat picture into a 3D hardcover using Boxshot3D.

34:41 MagicMove shifts to the book to the left, creating some “white space” which the audience has come to expect will be filled with something interesting, and I bring in two descriptions used for how Jobs thought about the customer experience.

34:58 I prepare this advice for cabin crew and airline staff not knowing who my exact audience would be, but in the knowledge the presentation would likely be seen on the web by those for whom the guidance on this slide would be appropriate. By offering guidance, it also gives people a take-home set of messages, and hopefully adds to their estimation of me as a “go to” authority on the subject.

36:00 I now show my tech knowledge by referring to a budget airline’s project using the iPad where fear of flying information could be included. The crew who let the cat of the bag was not Jetstar itself but the content developers.

37:09 Here I finish the talk by showing some slides from a colleague, a Qantas captain with whom I am preparing a fearful flyers’ course using a professional flight deck simulator. He was supposed to have been part of the presentation but became ill at the last moment, and stayed in Australia. As it is, it would have been a major presentation rewrite to include all of his slides had he been with me at APEX.

37:23 The money shot slide which shows the program we’re likely to run in 2012.

37:35 I felt the real urge to finish since I was so overtime, so rather than summarise the main points, I simply thanked the audience and let my first slide with my personal details confirm the presentation is over. Next time, I would take 30 seconds to make three brief summary points, including a “call to action”.

37:40 The moderator makes mention of my missing “co-pilot” since he’s listed in the APEX program and some might have come along fully expecting to hear from an airline captain.

Some final thoughts

This was the first time I had performed this presentation and while I was hoping I could bring it in on time, lack of rehearsal (I had been waiting all morning for the colleague’s slides to arrive by email) meant I was a little off. Should I do this again for another agency or group, it would be right on 30 minutes if that was my brief, or could easily be extended to 45 minutes if allowed. There would be a challenge to reduce it to the standard conference time of 20 minutes but there are plentiful slides that could be dropped and the show tightened to meet that criterion.

So, I hope it was worth it for you to read this long blog entry and see how I think about my presentations, from conceptualisation, to slide construction through to the live show.

In Presentation Magic workshops, I go through slide construction in detail, dropping out of the presentation and showing how I work with Keynote to achieve these effects. I don’t do this with Powerpoint as it doesn’t lend itself easily to my workflow or creativity, but I ‘d suggest in the hands of a competent user, 95% of what I showed can be achieved in Powerpoint, and perhaps a few extra things to boot.

Certainly, having a linear editor like ScreenFlow 3 was extremely helpful in producing the final product you see on YouTube, and I can only hope that when the next Keynote is released, perhaps as Keynote Pro X, it will get a rewrite to make presenters’ jobs that much easier yet get the creative juices flowing too.

Please join in the discussion with your comments or questions, below.