Category Archives: Presentation Skills

Over the weekend, I noticed almost a dozen application updates waiting for me in the iTunes App store for my iPhone 3G.

Two of those were from Dragon, firstly its Dragon Search App (below):

and also for its Dictate App. (below):

The two key improvement cited for both were: Support for the iPod Touch, and Enhanced user interface.

Let’s connect some dots. Imagining the the Apple tablet runs a version of the iPod OS (4.0 or a modified version), what’s to say that Dragon’s highly rated and free apps can’t be scaled for use in a tablet form factor. So along with a revolutionary user interface (I am listening to Steve Jobs in my head using the same words he employed at the iPhone release three years ago), might there be an optional voice-controlled dictation and search function from Dragon?

And extend it a little further, and have Dragon’s software also control operating the tablet (“Open Mail; new entry…”) something I can already do with MacSpeech Dictate for my Macbook Pro, along with a bluetooth headset which does double time linked to MacSpeech, and my iPhone currently (but not simultaneously). Macspeech is based on Dragon’s Naturally Speaking engine, well established in the Windows world. I’ve been using it with the Plantronics Bluetooth headset and it’s very accurate out of the box.

The question would be whether a built-in microphone would be up to the job, or if you’d have to don a headset to perform all the functions. But if the iPhone’s built-in microphone can do the job well enough (the Dragon iPhone/iPod software gets very high ratings) then perhaps that problem has already been solved.

Also remember that Apple has a dedicated speech recognition and synthesis research lab which has had input into Macs for a decade as well as the iPhone since its release, and you have a few more dots to connect.

It doesn’t have t be necessarily an either/or case for the tablet. Why not have both forms of input, touch and voice) as you can now for any Mac. Speech recognition will have huge benefits for certain professions, such as the health sciences, for those who cannot use keyboards or complicated finger-based controls, the commercial aviation industry who could bring up all their Jeppeson maps, and of course students from late elementary school through to graduate school (where texts and lectures will already be carried on the tablet).

Keeps getting more interesting, isn’t it…?

You know those often quoted statistics that Windows powers 90% of the world’s computers, or that 30,000,000 Powerpoints are given each day?

Do you ever wonder where these numbers come from?

Me too. The latter appears to come from Microsoft itself. Given my own made up statistic that 95% of them disobey most evidence-based rules for conveying engaging memorable messages, I have a lot of work ahead of me to offer up alternatives!

But what of the percentage of computers figures?

It depends on which computers and who’s using them.

It’s perhaps an apocryphal story of the Microsoft spokeswoman addressing a group of professional moviemakers touting certain wares. Allegedly she said in passing, “Of course, Windows operates on 95% of computers”. To which one wag replied, “Not in this room, lady”.

What then should we do with the figures we see quoted the last few Steve Jobs keynotes that 50% of Apple store purchasers of Macs are switchers, presumably from Windows. Not new computer users, nor Apple users updating, but switchers.

What will be the impact of an Apple tablet on potential switchers, I wonder?

If an Apple tablet is a glorified Kindle, the answer is nothing.

But what if Apple has developed a new device, one much more attuned to the needs of a public who is not concerned with operating systems, Tuesday patches, malware, spyware, trojans and viruses? What if the vast number of general public users just want to work with email, surf the net, chat and social network, watch movies and listen to music?

Leave it to the vast bulk of that purported 95% to run Windows on a desktop machine: airlines, banks, enterprise, universities and various research institutes. But what of Mom and Pop, their kids, the self-employed, SMEs?

What if the tablet was actually more than a reader but a worker? An iWorker, able to use a form of the iWork productivity suite now available for Macs? I’ve hinted at this in other blog entries, but a recent New York Times report seems to suggest something really is going in with iWork and the tablet:

Source: The New York Times, January 8, 2007 “A Deluge of Devices for Reading and Surfing” by Brad Stone and Nick Bilton,

Let’s also imagine that’s it’s a device that runs iPhone 4.0, to take advantage of some of the 120,000 apps. Apple has in its iTunes Store. Some of those will be reader apps, but I’m betting Steve Jobs will do to publishing what he’s done with music and movies: allow his hardware and software to be portals for purchasing. I don’t buy the idea that all publications will have their own apps. And I’m betting that with Pages we’ll all be able to engage in self-publishing, and I am breathless with what will happen with Apple’s presentation software, Keynote.

If it turns out this way, we’ll have a device which will surprise and delight Windows users who will no longer have to fear opening their email, wonder if they have the latest drivers, or wonder which tech support system to ring – the hardware make, the graphics chip maker, Microsoft, the application creator, like Adobe, or the printer manufacturer.

What will happen to the world of computing when the operating system is of no great consequence?

We no longer call it computing, that’s what.

We no longer think of buying a PC.

Computers will be those large mainframes spitting out airline timetables and tickets, crunching large databases, just like it was before the personal computer came along. Talk about back to the future!

The rest of us will be making the transfer from laptops and desktops, learning a new way of interacting with our information, and wondering how we ever were so short-sighted as to think personal computing was all about the operating system.

Now that Steve Ballmer has undressed the HP “back to the future” tablet PC at CES last night, supposedly calling it a “slate” type device in an attempt to steal Apple’s forthcoming thunder, we can take a break from Apple tablet killer prognostications and review a little history. (PC World called the HP tablet “underwhelming”; The respected Tom’s hardware rated Ballmer’s keynote a “complete fizzle”.)

I strongly recall Steve Jobs showing an Indiana Jones “Raiders of the Lost Ark” film clip a few years ago in a keynote showing a new iPod which disappointed the punditry because it did not feature video. This was the October 26, 2004 “special music event” which saw the release of the U2 iPod, as well as the colour iPodPhoto. The clip itself was an Indiana Jones movie and featured Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones) and John Rhys-Davies (Sallah) looking at each other in close-up. Steve Jobs used it to say why Apple was introducing a photo-based iPod and not a video-based iPod as many had been hoping for… and had already been released in a rather clunky form-factor by Apple’s competitors.

The lines from Indiana Jones are (from IMDB.com):

[the old man reveals writing on the back of the medallion, which states that part of the staff must be removed]
Indiana: Balloq’s medallion only had writing on one side? You sure about that?
Sallah: Positive!
Indiana: Balloq’s staff is too long.
Indiana, Sallah: They’re digging in the wrong place!

By this, Jobs publicly offered that the world was not ready for a video-based iPod because taking and sharing photos was what the world wanted, and there was no suitable content for the iPod video. Not all agreed with him. What we later learnt was the subtext to this was that Apple was not yet ready to release such an iPod because the right deals with media producers (Hollywood film producers, as well as television series makers) hadn’t been concluded. Unlike Apple’s competitors who provided the means to (slowly) rip your own media onto a portable player (sourced from DVDs and VCR recordings – this was 2004, remember), Apple’s way was to do deals with the industries who made and controlled the distribution of quality video content. Your viewing of video on the iPod would be high quality commercial content done legally, not YouTube quality backyard wrestling, cats getting stuck in tissues boxes, or illegally ripped content.

Then  year later, deals in place and iTunes updated, the 5G video-enabled iPod was released.

Fast-forward a couple of years to Macworld 2008 for Jobs’ next misdirecting statement that clues us in, his famous “People don’t read books anymore” when discussing the release of the Amazon Kindle. Here’s how the New York Times’ Randall Stross wrote about it, January 27, 2008:

The Stross article went on to dismantle some of Jobs’ comments, but in a few weeks time we will once more discover how misdirecting Steve can be. Why? Because we are probably reading and writing more than ever before, if we include email and web-based work. In other words, there’s reading and then there’s reading. And Steve knows this.

What you will hear in the next few weeks, while those who had hoped for the Holy Grail of tablets to emerge from CES bear their disappointment, will be much “Apple didn’t invent it” invective. As if that should dismiss any entitlements Apple might have to develop something revolutionary.  As Jobs showed with the iPhone introduction three years ago, you introduce a new Apple product by taking the usual suspects lauded to be the best, fillet them by showing their weaknesses, and then not just close the gap, but leap passed it – even with your first attempt. And rather than put everything you’ve got into the initial product, bring it to market when it’s ready to do its job but not before. In the iPhone’s case, it started off fairly knobbled compared to the current 3GS version. But back then, AT&T certainly didn’t have the 3G bandwidth Jobs knew would be necessary to realise the iPhone’s full potential with the mobile Safari browser, and Apple was still to put in place its road map for independent developers of applications, now downloaded in the billions, and perhaps apart from its UI, the iPhone’s key advantage.

The same process has been applied, and will continue to be with the tablet. When detractors see it, many will feel underwhelmed by it given that it now rivals Moses’ tablets brought down from Mt. Sinai (as you can see below, originally containing 15 commandments on three tablets, but Moses was a bit of a klutz…) in comparison to the Jesus’ phone (odd public descriptions given Jobs’ Buddhist leanings… I imagine Britt Hume doesn’t buy Apple products).

So when Jobs speaks about “nobody reads books”, don’t confuse it with “reading”, because this is one thing the tablet will excel at it. Not just the hardware to aid your reading, but the source and content deals he has already stitched up, which we will see demonstrated and discussed by various media representatives on stage. If anything, the tablet will likely increase reading rates around the world by making it fun, with multimedia, instant access, and value-added. Encyclopaedic works will come alive, updated on a regular (no doubt subscription) basis in a way Microsoft’s Encarta tried but failed to do, ultimately thwarted by Google. More egg splattered.

Just imagine a child is reading a book on his tablet, comes across a word he doesn’t understand, and then through a series of clicks or swipes on the word, causes a balloon to pop up on screen. There, either a video recording of a person or perhaps just the words appear, giving the word’s meaning, origin, synonyms and pronunciation. (I use he because boys have more reading difficulties than girls). Reading becomes fun again for kids and their ability to spell enhanced. If the child grows tired, who’s to say another couple of swipes and the book is read to them. Just think of what occurred to Garageband at its last update when world-famous musicians and their tutorials were added to the application. Who’s to say if Apple has not done deals with the likes of Audible.com or other audiobook publishers, or even updated its speech synthesis capabilities to be more “natural” and less robotic, as with the iPod Shuffle 3rd gen.

I know that for some I may seem to be jumping late onto the bandwagon of cheering for a tablet, but you’d be very wrong. Let me refer you to a blog entry I wrote five years ago in December 2004. First some screen shots so you can see it for yourself, and a link here for the full article.

As it turns out, the name “iScribe” is used by a physician eprescription service for PDAs. And because of his dissing of reading books, I can’t see John Gruber’s suggestion Apple resurrects the iBook nomenclature coming true. Let’s wait and see.

If you take your presentation giving seriously, no doubt you will have conducted some research along the way, otherwise you’d never have arrived at this small part of the blogosphere.

That research could have taken one of a number of turns along the way, including researching:

1. Your audience

2. Your subject material

3. The intersection between your preferred presenting style, the subject material and the audience.

Now if you’re here on this blog, your preferred presenting style is likely to include using slideware such as Keynote or Powerpoint, but it could also include Apple’s Preview or Quicktime, or Adobe’s Acrobat amongst a number of multimedia applications. But there maybe times when you’ll decide that (1) and (2) together suggest leaving aside technologies, and just doing a stand-and-deliver, such as being a best man or bridesmaid, father or mother of the bride or groom, sports coach or trainer, etc.

Now for some time it’s been argued in train-the-trainer and pedagogical domains that audience members have their own learning style, and presenters do well to try and match those style(s).

If you head into the literature to read up on learning styles, one of the terms you’ll most readily come upon is called VARK, which stands for Visual Aural Read/write Kinaesthetic, and refers to modalities of learning and expression.

The suggestion is that information presented in certain ways is more likely to be assimilated when its presentation style matches that of the receiver’s preferred learning style. In the therapy field, the question of preferred style has been popularised by the controversial therapeutic approach known as Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), which has also made inroad into corporate training.

Relevance to Presentation Skills

If you attend 99% of Powerpoints delivered in the corporate world, it would be fair to say that the presenters (or is it the HR or Marketing departments) have made an implicit assumption that their audiences’ preferred learning style is Read/Write, with a little Aural thrown in when the presenter reads the slide to you!

Which is at odds with what recent neuroscience tells us about the centrality of the visual system to our operating in the world outside our heads, ie., while many of us engage in loads of self-talk (hundreds of words a minute said to ourselves) in terms of perceiving the world out there, we use our visual systems in preference to our other senses.

In contrast, I’ll often talk about my dog, Shrek, when speaking with groups (and patients for that matter) about information processing as it’s generally believed canines’ order of preference for sense-making is: Olfactory (smell), then Aural, then Visual. If you watch your dog closely, you’ll see his or her nostrils flaring frequently, sampling the odours around him (and at quite some distance too), and his ears will cock and move around independently (most easily seen on a German Shepherd Dog, like Shrek). He’ll prefer to initially sniff and cock ears, than move his head to look.

The idea of representational system preferences, as argued by those who advocate systems like VARK, has been around for quite some time, especially when it comes to the teaching of children. And of course, in the professional domain of presenting to adults, it also bears some thought as to how an audience can best learn new material.

But short of giving everyone a questionnaire before the presentation and then doing the math on the group’s average scores (you can look at a VARK questionnaire here), what can a presenter do? And moreover, is it that necessary to think about these styles, apart from the predominance of the visual to humans?

New and controversial research was published late last year in the journal, Psychological Science in the Public Interest. (You can see an abstract here). Entitled, Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence, the paper (Authors: Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork) discusses the history of learning styles and serves to challenge many of the assumptions which have been held dear by many trainers over the last few decades.

Here is a part of the Abstract:

“For more than three decades, the idea that instructional methods should match a student’s particular learning style has been a powerful influence in education. The wide appeal of the notion that, for example, some students best learn visually while others best learn by listening is evident in the vast number of learning-style tests and teaching guides available for purchase and used in schools. But does scientific research really support the learning-styles hypothesis?  In a new assessment of the available evidence, authors Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork conclude that the learning-styles hypothesis has little, if any, empirical grounding.”

Now if you are steeped in your thinking about learning styles, this will come as something of a slap in the face.

It’s much like I present to Presentation Magic attendees steeped in the cognitive style of Powerpoint who are in for a rude shock when I suggest that slides filled with text and abiding by certain rules such as “6 x 6” (“slides should contain no more than six lines each containing six words”) have no empirical support.

Here’s how the authors conclude their abstract:

“What psychological evidence does show is that people are inclined to hold false beliefs about how they learn and that they tend to learn and teach others in nonoptimal ways. Among other things, the report has significant implications for instructional approaches, and underscores the need to ensure that teaching methods are informed by sound scientific research, not fad educational theories or intuition.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s David Glenn interviewed the lead author, Harold Pasher, who offered the money quote for presenters:

“What (it) means for instructors.. is that they should not waste any time or energy trying to determine the composition of learning styles in their classrooms. (Are 50 percent of my students visual learners? Are 20 percent of them kinesthetic learners?)

Instead, teachers should worry about matching their instruction to the content they are teaching. Some concepts are best taught through hands-on work, some are best taught through lectures, and some are best taught through group discussions.”

In other words, if we can generalise to adults in presentations (perhaps a dangerous thing to do), do understand in general how humans learn, but keep a close eye on your content and how it can best be presented so that most in the audience have a half-chance of catching on!

And it also means, mixing it up, repeating the message in a variety of formats, switching modalities including your voice cadence, can all serve to increase the chances of audience engagement (and learning)  as well as having them do things, even if it means unsettling them emotionally before you bring your talk back on topic (something I just seem to do without much effort or preparation. I call it my “Huh? Aha!” approach to presenting. It’s my personal style, but one I use sparingly, mixing it up with other styles). Having your audience just sit there and read your slides (or have you read them) is almost universally high on lists of presenting don’ts, but still remains the dominant method of presenting.

In my Presentation Magic workshops, I look to the evidence and try to acquaint attendees with what to me is the research that informs the presenting-by-slideware domain. Several names appear frequently in the literature, and one of them is Richard Mayer from UCSB, who has researched more than most the constructs underlying multimedia learning.

The Chronicle’s Glenn also asked him about the Pasher et al research:

“Even though the learning-style idea might not work,” says Richard E. Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, “it might encourage teachers to think about how their students learn and what would be the best instructional methods for a particular lesson.”

Not everyone supports the research findings just published, suggesting that the paper is too thin when it comes to research showing that tracking students learning styles is a good thing.

Here’s how Glenn concludes his article, with part of an interview with David Kolb, a Professor of Organisation Learning at Case Western who has been in the forefront of this research for several decades:

“… Mr. Kolb also says that the paper’s bottom line is probably correct: There is no strong evidence that teachers should tailor their instruction to their students’ particular learning styles. (Mr. Kolb has argued for many years that college students are better off if they choose a major that fits their learning style. But his advice to teachers is that they should lead their classes through a full “learning cycle,” without regard to their students’ particular styles.)

“Matching is not a particularly good idea,” Mr. Kolb says. “The paper correctly mentions the practical and ethical problems of sorting people into groups and labeling them. Tracking in education has a bad history.”

In my next article I’m going to look at how two top thinkers in the presentation field, Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte, ask their students and clients to conceive of presenting along two orthogonal dimensions. Then I’m going to show you why that’s only part of the story, and why you need to consider a third dimension.

Welcome to 2010, which is either the end of the first decade of the 2000’s or the first year of the second decade. Personally, I see it as the end of the first decade since there was no year 0.

In previous years, by now I would be in the US, either in NYC, Miami, LA or San Francisco (or all four from Christmas onwards) preparing to attend Macworld. But right now, things here in Melbourne are quiet and leisurely, so it gives time to catch up on TV and videos I didn’t see during the year, and of course prepare for Presentation Magic at Macworld in February.

Why would I spend time doing this during summer, when so many Aussies are outdoors? Well, it’s not as if I’m in hibernation, but we occasionally have such hot days here (over 40C several days in a row) that it’s best to stay indoors and avoid getting burnt to a sizzle. But more importantly, I get a chance to take my time pouring over media which I use for inspiration when preparing my Macworld presentation, as I’ll describe in a tip for better presentations a little later. But first…

What I was doing in 2009

I’ve  just about finished working on a year long project with my old college professor helping him develop a corporate-based resilience/better workplace performance program and book, using Keynote as the central message delivery tool. The delightful Acorn software has proved its utility in helping transfer Keynote’s exported slide images into a format suitable for inclusion in a workbook. Quite pricy at $49.95, I had originally purchased it as one of the apps. in a bundle that itself was about $60, so it’s update fee of about $20 was reasonable.

The main reason for getting the update was to take advantage of its ability to resize the images Keynote exported its slides as (72dpi) to a size the book publisher demanded (300dpi). Once this conversion takes place in only a moment, there is a menu instruction in Acorn which allows you to directly bring the image into Mail and send it, saving quite a few clicks.

Working over the length of time we’ve spent together with the Prof who is steeped in using Powerpoint for all his training and lecturing, has allowed me to see how he has grasped the more visual method I’ve been advocating for a few years now, in place of a text-dense style more commonly seen in the sciences and enterprise setting.

After a little time getting him oriented, the Prof quickly understood what I was on about, and became a very good apprentice, a rather ironic reversal of roles, but not an unprecedented one in the science field. I had a distinct advantage in being persuasive because the Prof’s background is delivering training systems in emotional regulation to teachers, students, and school systems. As such, he was very much up on children’s development in terms of their cognitive and emotional development, and of course their learning styles.

And being heavily involved in the teaching and training of teachers, he was aware of just how much new media is influencing that teaching, which made my use of Keynote so much easier for him to absorb.

A second and ongoing example

I’m also working currently on a new professional education program for my professional society. The aim is to bring recent graduates, as well as old heads, up to date with new new business models of practice management. This is especially important in Australia because of the admission of psychology services into our nationalised medicine scheme. Prior to 2006, mental health services within the public sector were primarily delivered by GPs and psychiatrists. Private psychologists’ services were only rebated if you had private health insurance, which here in Australia operates on a user-pays system, rather than the employer providing benefits.

When psychological services became rebatable under our universal health scheme, many psychologists left government and corporate employ to set up practices, while many freshly-minted graduates could hang up their shingle without the previous need to gather experience as an associate or employee of more experienced practitioners. Without their courses offering any business skills training, you can imagine that not all graduates, no matter how effective they may be, will survive the vicissitudes of being self-employed.

Hence, the desire to offer post-graduate training in business skills, which will also give applied training in both marketing and ethical behaviour. I was asked to join the reference group not just because I was a well known practitioner, but because the group leadership hoped to tap into my presentation skills.

The group has been meeting for several months, with a number of modules written already. Now it becomes my task to begin to turn them into some deliverable format suitable for both group training, and web-based delivery. Now, a few of the group know of my particular skills, while others merely thought I was proficient in Powerpoint. After all, how much variation can there be in how psychologists present?

A few weeks ago, with the group wishing to move to the next stage of the project, from writing to delivery, it was my turn to show my wares. At the last moment, one of the module writers decided not to travel to the meeting, leaving me to develop his module presentation alone, and to present it too. Because the module was text-dense, written as a Word document, it took some time to think through how I would stick to my design principles, avoid doing an expected text-dump onto a slide, yet capture the attention of the rather jaded group who have seen more than their fair share of disengaging presentations.

I had to also consider not taking them too far out of their comfort zone, so I chose a combination of text and visual slides. The question was how to introduce the text while not making it seem like just another Powerpoint slide, and to do it in just a few slides, because we were time-poor.

I managed to do so in such a way that the original plan of videoing the presentation with a group present to make it “feel” involving was dropped, in favour of a DVD and web-based presentation without the need for a live audience recording.

It only took about 10 minutes, and the process of convincing the group to shift its expectation occurred on the first slide, which I wanted to reflect the composition of the intended audience: it needed to be dynamic including the promise of a non-standard, not-boring “powerpoint”. So I chose a professional looping animation, a soundtrack from Garageband’s “news and broadcast” grouping, and a fade-out build so that a few moments after the soundtrack started, the animation would already be rolling.

Let’s first look at the slide as the group saw it, then I’ll explain what I actually did:

Here’s what the slide options in Keynote’s Inspector look like to do this:

A very simple-looking slide actually has more going on than first meets the eye.

Here’s the running order:

1. The soundtrack from Garageband called Celestial Body begins on my click. Simultaneously, the background animation Design 02 .mov file begins (2). At this point, the audience only sees black but hears the sound track.

3.  I slowly auto-dissolve out the black Shape that covers the slide so that when the animation is visible, it’s already in motion. I wanted this to represent dynamism in action, rather than a still shot that then moves into action. That looks like a slideshow, while I wanted something that looked unPowerpointy.

4. I then brought the title in with a build style which matched the direction of the background animation, again to give a sense of dynamism. The build style is called, Lens flare, and I asked it to last two seconds.

The deep impression I wanted to leave on the small audience was that this was not their father’s Powerpoint they were about to watch. I wanted to approach the kind of current affairs or professional level training schemes a very expensive contract would allow, even if we were doing the certificate on the cheap!

This first slide grabbed their attention, but I had to follow up with a second slide sequence to “sell” my concepts of shifting away from standard slide construction and presentation. Because the module writer was not present, I asked him to take two pictures of himself, one facing the camera, and the other side on, pointing at something off camera.

I then imported the pictures into Keynote and used the alpha masking to eliminate the background, leaving only the writer, Chris, present. From there, I had to use a little magic to demonstrate to the group what the slides would look like to the audience watching via DVD or the web. So what you see below was the slides constructed for this particular audience, not the final audience, to whom Chris would be speaking “live”.

I had to represent Chris somehow, rather than me reading his words. So what you see is my representation of how Chris would interact with the slides when we record the real deal for the real audience. Naturally, he would be speaking between words appearing on the screen, but speaking the words as they appeared. I’ve also included the opening title sequence once more to show how the next slides would appear.

Finally, I wanted the group to see how to illustrate references to books and journals. The following sequence shows Chris referring to a marketing publication published by the Tasmanian government. So we show Australia on a globe, swoosh in the publication’s cover (with a slant distortion courtesy of Picturesque), then show the URL for the publication’s pdf (which moves Chris out of picture), then “open” the publication and then highlight a specific section. Almost all of this can also be done in Powerpoint.

Now for your Keynote (or Powerpoint) first tip for 2010:

In order to remain creative, as I hope I have been (at least my intended audience thought so), you must keep flexing your creative muscles. This means not waiting until you have to do a presentation to practise using your preferred slideware’s gifts. Otherwise, you run the risk of using the same techniques over and over again, and not stretching yourself intellectually and creatively.

To do this for myself, I watch current affairs programs, TV documentaries and mainstream movies and try and emulate some of the effects I observe. These media often represent some of the most intriguing and engaging visual styles, as well as being what so many young people take for granted, making your standard Powerpoint or Keynote look quite dull.

Sometimes, it’s clear Keynote can’t duplicate the effects, but a reasonable facsimile can be attempted. This is one way to understand the software’s strengths and limitations (and also serves my secondary purpose of speaking with the Keynote developers to advance its capabilities for the next update). I’ll sometimes go back to existing slides and re-invigorate them with new effects, especially how I bring in text. In fact, I have a Keynote stack called “bringing in text” which is like a growing library of text effects I keep adding to as I gather new ideas.

I keep a similar stack for callouts and highlights where I can practise timings, animations and builds before exporting the slide effects into an upcoming presentation stack. Often these slides are half-finished because I can’t quite achieve the effect I want, and other times I’ll go back and try and complete the slide.

Now I know many in the presentation business will think this effort is unnecessary, but because I teach and give presentations, it’s important that I bring to my audiences new ways of thinking and doing, rather then merely learning how to understand Keynote’s operations. There are plenty of books around for that, but I want to go beyond the mechanics of Keynote and take it to another level that pairs Keynote’s abilities with audiences’ need for engaging and entertaining presentations.

I’ll keep adding more tips in the coming days, as I keep preparing for Macworld, and try to raise the bar higher.

During my Presentation magic workshops, I often roll out one of my favourite New Yorker cartoons, now animated and available on iTunes, called Satan’s Software. It features the Devil in Hades interviewing for a new “position” on his team. Seated opposite him is a candidate to whom he poses the question: “I’m interested in someone well versed in the art of torture… do you know Powerpoint?” I often use the slide when discussing Donald Rumsfeld’s Powerpoint slide for the management of Iraq after the coalition of the willing had succeeded in its mission.

Today in the Australian independent website, New Matilda, I found published a rather similar cartoon, which attempts to also offer “opinion” on current airline security, terrorism and governmental response.

The cartoonist is Lindsay Foyle, and here’s the screenshot (click on it to enlarge) of the New Matilda page where his cartoon appears today.

For my Powertools Workshop at Macworld in February, I’m going to highlight scientific presenting during the two-days. I’m doing this following a one-day workshop I conducted in October for my own professional society of psychologists, where after three years of submitting the workshop (either as a half day or full day), it was finally accepted. I have the evaluations which I’ll publish soon (warts and all!) but suffice to say that I felt vindicated in my Presentation Magic approach even though many who attended had been quite steeped in their careers in the cognitive style of Powerpoint.

Because I was presenting to my peers, my task was especially challenging as I was unsure of their level of knowledge of the psychological concepts I was invoking as evidence – some would be professors in the field, some would have long lost the knowledge they may once have had as students, while others had perhaps never been exposed to some of the concepts. This variation in depth of knowledge is one all presenters face, and requires both careful consultation with the conference or workshop organisers (“Who is the likely attendee? Who else is presenting similar material? Are they undergraduates or seasoned professionals, etc”). In my case, I had to take an educated guess, and once more felt vindicated that I do not script what I say during the workshop.

It may mean you can get away with using acronyms for the entire presentation, or that each term needs to be explained fully, or that jargon (sometimes called technical expressions) can be readily used or put to one side.

What became clear to me during the day is that scientists are very interested in the field of presenting, but will only improve their presenting if they become more audience-focussed, i.e., they become exquisitely aware of how humans learn and remember.

As I have suggested in a previous blog post on climate scientists’ presentations – which resemble an information “dump” from Word into Powerpoint for the worst offenders – it’s too easy for scientists to hastily throw together slides in the belief that on the day, their spoken descriptions will “bring it all together”. As many of you who attend such conferences will attest, they are wrong in their assumptions.

While I continue to work on a major blog article to help scientists (and others who work with lots of complex concepts and jargon-driven text), I also keep a look out for others who share my ideas about such presenting and its pitfalls.

So I was delighted today to locate an article in the December 17 online issue of Bioworld, entitled “Technology Begets Miscommunication: Biotech Conferences and Meetings Dumbed-Down by Smart Devices” by Mike Williams.

Williams takes a swipe at his colleagues who seem unable to display the appropriate etiquette when it comes to employing technologies, as well as corporate time and energy wasting strategies.

Here’s a quote Williams offers regarding conference behaviour:

“As many presenters at biotech conferences have become only too well aware as they try to engage their audience, they are ignored as the latter fiddle with their various communication devices (including wireless laptops) to check for messages, stock prices, play games or even text message/email other members of the audience to comment on the quality/futility/pathos of the meeting and/or presenter. The consequent lack of attention then necessitates a partial or complete recapitulation of the presentation if, by chance, a question is asked — or the subsequent rescheduling of the entire meeting when few of the participants can remember or agree on what the meeting was about and whether any, or what, resolution was reached.”

This will likely resonate with many scientists and others who regularly attended peer-reviewed conferences.

My interest in Mr. William’s writing was piqued when I scanned down to another paragraph:

“A perhaps bigger contributor to ineffectual meetings than participant-driven electronic disengagement is the almost universal (mis)use of Microsoft Corp.’s PowerPoint as THE meeting communication tool. Like other software creations from Redmond, Wash., PowerPoint is visually appealing but often fails to achieve precisely what the user intended. One cynical biotech in New England actually informed a job applicant that its differentiating technology platform was PowerPoint.”

Ah, someone else who recognises how organisations’ reliance on certain products can lead to miscommunication or obfuscation.

And close to the conclusion of this one page article, is a section which eventually mentions Apple’s Keynote, in the context of those who’ve decided to put Powerpoint to one side:

“In a frequently quoted interview in the San Jose Mercury News, from August 1997, Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc., in noting that his company had purged 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides from its network, was quoted as saying, “we’ve had three unbelievable record-breaking quarters since we banned PowerPoint.” McNealy also noted that he considered PowerPoint a “huge waste of corporate productivity.”

His comments should be viewed in the context of competitive hubris — one computer entrepreneur’s view of another’s product — a perspective reinforced by the observation that Apple’s Keynote, a software package with similar functionality, rarely provokes the level of abuse and outrage as PowerPoint, a possible reflection of the computer literacy, intelligence and communication skills of Macintosh users. (sic)”

And I promise, this mention of Keynote and Macintosh users is all Mr. Williams’ original work!

Next week, I’ll have more time to spend on my scientist-oriented article: while Apple continues to promote Keynote at its online tutorial homepage using corporate presentations as the exemplar, I have formed the strong belief that science (and education for that matter) is underserved. In other words, there’s an opening I’m more than happy to explore and exploit, gently of course!