The more conservative an industry, the more conservative and unengaging their presentations (sigh)

Posted on March 6, 2011 | 2 comments

[I attended an aviation symposium a few weeks ago, and tried out a new text writer for the iPad. How best to try it out other than using it to blog in real time. Below, the results, cut and pasted into WordPress for the iPad].

I’m Sitting in an airline and aviation conference in the Human Factors stream, and being persecuted with poor PowerPoint.

Already we have had to drop out of the show to go in to Windows Media Player to show a humorous video the presenter hoped would stimulate our interest. She succeeded in getting a few laughs due to the slapstick nature of the video (one of those “motivational” slick videos).

The outstanding thing so far, from a presenter’s viewpoint, has been the disconnect between what’s on the slides – mainly text – and what is being said.

What we have been seeing is a slab of text with the usual bullet pointed listings, which is read automatically by the audience, to judge by the audience heads rotating towards the screen and away from the presenter. This is followed by the presenter talking without a script, in ways that have little connection to the words on the screen.

In this way, the presentation becomes a lecture, not an engaging presentation, not helped by the fact we are in a university lecture theatre.

The presenter is also standing well away from the slides, which subtly tells us the slides are irrelevant to what she is saying. This of course is a tad ironic, given we are discussing human factors in aviation disasters! Much of this subject is bounded by issues of attention, getting and keeping it, in the face of potential overloading of sensory channels. If only presenters, especially those who talk about training adults, would apply their own knowledge base to their presentation efforts.

There is also a disconnect when the presenter refers to future slides coming up in the talk. This is ok if you’re asked a question from the audience on a topic which you will refer to later, but what’s coming up ought not to be given away by the presenter themselves unless there’s a very good reason to do so. I think it happens when presenters are unconfident in their ability to tell stories, and thus link concepts.

We are also being given lots of potentially interesting examples but they are not being illustrated, only described with words.

But the examples in fact cry out for a picture, or a short movie, so we in the audience are challenged to change modalities of information transfer, lest staying in the same narrow modality – listening – leads to boredom.

Judging by the lack of spontaneous questions and minimal note taking, I’d say many are feeling disengaged and wondering how relevant this talk is to them personally, and to the subject in general. In other words, did the talk’s abstract meet their expectations upon delivery. Of course, in the aviation industry, aircraft manufacturers are severely penalized financially if their products do not meet promised expectations.

In which case, as her talk was coming to an end, I formulated a fantasy question to ask, (but I was too prudent to actually ask):

“Dear Presenter, if you were to apply your knowledge of human factors to your own PowerPoint, what would you apply first and where?”

2 Comments

Posted in iPad, iWork, Powerpoint, Presentation Skills

The iPad as Enterprise Trojan Horse – lessons for those who don’t learn from history (with Keynote as lead warrior)

Posted on March 5, 2011 | 6 comments

Macworld 2011 has come and gone, and I am happy to say my presentations featuring Keynote went very well. I’m now awaiting the formal evaluations to be shared from IDG which I will post, warts and all. You can read two attendees’ post-workshop reviews to get a feel from an attendees’ viewpoint of what happened on the day:

1. From Ron Albu, the President of the Hawaii Macintosh and Apple User Group, click here.

2. From Gary Bowman’s blog, here.

The picture at top was taken by Gary who kindly allowed me to post it here.

I will give an extended description of the full day workshop in a blog article to come, but I was very fortunate to have two senior members of the Apple Keynote team attend. They observed the workshop and listened closely to other attendees and their desires for how Keynote ought to evolve. Of course, I also offered demonstrations of Keynote’s strengths and weaknesses in the hope it might add to some future feature set.

The day after the workshop, I offered a User session of 75″, featuring Keynote on the iPad. At the time, Keynote had just been updated so that it could now operate in presentation mode, just like its older sibling on the Macintosh, and it also featured presenter notes.

I had to admit to the group present that I only occasionally use Keynote on the iPad for presentations, as usual files have until now been much too media rich to survive the transition to the iPad. I do use the iPad version almost as a sketch pad to jot down ideas for a future presentation much the way others might use a “back of the napkin” pen and paper technique to record ideas.

That said, as I do for most workshops, I started this session by placing the iPad in some kind of historical context, by firstly saying that I had written about my desire for a tablet and Keynote application for it in later 2004, here.

Here is a partial screen shot of what I wrote:

I include this screenshot (do go and read the rest of the article where I mention Keynote magic) so as to give you a date at which I first thought about tablets and Keynote for presentations.

So after this curious introduction, I then spent some time showing screenshots from the webpages of some fairly well-known iPad naysayers who shortly after January 27, 2010 when the iPad was first shown (my presentation also fell on January 27), roundly criticised the device as Jobs’ folly. It so reminded me of the reviews the first iPod received almost ten years ago, when it was greeted with much mirth from pundits who wondered who would spend $399 for a 5GB mp3 player. Who, indeed!

[UPDATE: Horace Dedieu has today blogged a reverse chronological of pundit short sightedness here, for your bemusement. It’s based on Terry Gregory’s aaplinvestor blog here.]

Now a year later, I showed the same critical pundits display long term memory loss (or active avoidance of their own short sightedness) since they were now lauding the iPad and criticising the wannabees still to find their way to the marketplace. I suppose when a device has been the fastest selling device in history (according to some estimates) and has 90% of marketshare, it would be awkward to not laud it.

With the humorous pokings at the tech media out of the way, it was my turn to take aim at what might be a surprising target: Keynote for Macintosh users.

If there was a group who were most vocal in their disappointment with Keynote 1.0 for the iPad, it was Keynote 5 users. Like me, they too had long hoped for some other ways to use Keynote, and when the iPad was shown on January 27, 2010 in a demo by Phil Schiller, the belief was formed by many that it would merely replicate the functionality of its bigger, older sibling.

Of course, once they paid their ten bucks and began bringing in their large, multi-build, multi-transition and multi-font desktop Keynote files, disaster struck. Keynote for the iPad lost many of their carefully constructed builds, could not handle animations, lost fonts, and worst of all, lost the ability to maintain groups, whereby images and text could be grouped as one image for various builds and effects.

Oh, and not to mention the absence presenter notes and no presentation display such that current and next slides could be seen adjacent to each other (since corrected in the current version, 1.0.3). Keynote could display out to a projector, but it couldn’t even operate in mirror mode.

All this meant that well-versed users of Keynote for the desktop were in for massive disappointment and frustration. Essentially, these were independent presentation softwares, and unless your desktop file resembles a very simple but all too typical Powerpoint slideshow – all text and minimal builds and transitions – there was no point in creating a super show in Keynote and then moving it over to the iPad. Which by the way required such circuitous efforts as to make many of us scratch our heads and wonder, “What were they thinking?”

Truly, the various comments I received was that Keynote 1.0 was a rush job, done at the behest of Steve Jobs in order to give the iPad the semblance of a business tool, rather than a toy for kids to play games with…

But in laying some criticisms at the feet of my Keynote-using brethren for having such high hopes even though we all knew the very low processing and graphics power of the iPad, I also suggested to them that if one had come in from the cold of the land of Powerpoint for Windows – again,  all simple text slides and minimal use of animation and transitions – Keynote on the iPad would prove to be a delightful revelation!

I suggested that such users, perhaps purchasing their first Apple product (or their second after their iPhone) would nonetheless be wowed by Keynote for the iPad with its albeit limited transitions and builds. But limited in this case is a subjective term, given the low level of advanced presentations one sees in workshops and conferences. For this group, Keynote on the iPad could open up new possibilities, in much the same way those of who first began using Keynote for the Mac in 2003 had discovered a new way of producing visually rich presentation styles.

I went a little further, and noted that Keynote for the iPad was clearly a very popular app on the App Store to judge by its published rankings, and that the engineering team had produced three updates in a year, while the desktop version was still waiting for its impending update after more than two years waiting. Now we know where all that energy has gone – the Keynote team is not a big one, and Apple has limited resources after all.

What I did say too is that I expected there to be increasing parity between the feature sets of the two Keynotes, so that one day there will be easy transfer between the two platforms with no loss of functionality. Indeed, in at least one respect, Keynote on the iPad is ahead of the desktop version, in ways that suggest what we may see in a the next update. I’m referring to the ability of Keynote to layer objects on a slide, and move them forward and backward relative to other objects.

I make great use of this undervalued property of Keynote in my workshops. On the desktop version, its implementation is in dire need of improvement, and indeed Powerpoint  2011 for the Mac has a “coverflow” type means of showing and moving slide elements. On the iPad it’s also down with a slide control, as you can see in the screenshot below:

I see feature parity between the desktop and iPad versions as the next goal, with perhaps feature sets unique to the iPad to take advantage of its useability much like we see now in its versions of Garageband and iMovie. Who knows what the gyro might mean for presentations! Now that iPad 2 has arrived with its twice as fast processor and “up to nine times as fast” graphics processor, I fully expect Keynote to be updated on the iPad perhaps to version 2, and coincide with the release around the same time, of the desktop version. Don’t lay bets on this, however, as guessing when Keynote will be updated is like asking when QuarkExpress would move from System 9 to OS X (for those who remember what a laggard it was).

So with sales of iPads exceeding even Apple’s expectations (as was told to me by the Apple crew who attended my workshop), I return to something else I discussed and showed in my User group presentation: that I believe the iPad, and Keynote with it, is acting as a Trojan Horse to move Apple products into industries and sectors where they have been unwanted by the IT leadership for various reasons, cost and security being primary, and “it’s not Microsoft compatible” being in the mix too.

The story of the Trojan Horse is of course a wonderful metaphor for the secret intrusion into well-guarded locations of troops who would bring mayhem once released from the wooden beast in the dead of night.

In the iPad story, it’s not CTOs who are asking for the iPad to come into the enterprise, but it’s coming from both ends – workers bringing their own iPhones and iPads so as to better get work done – and CEOs who have discovered the delights of these products, much to the chagrin of the security minded IT departments who inwardly scream about another system to learn about, especially after years of sniping at the little computer company who could.

So for my workshop I created the video below to represent the story of the iPad acting as Trojan Horse. Watch it to the very end, and I’ll tell you more about it.

The video was gathered from YouTube clips of the movie of the Trojan Horse from a few years ago, and the mp4s downloaded moved into iMovie 6HD for editing so as to get the sequence I wanted. The sound was also heavily edited.

The video was then exported as an mp4 into Keynote, where the pictures of the iPad were duplicated into a grouped array, and then used with a motion build to move in almost precise timing with the Horse saddle as it moved into the walled city.

This got quite a laugh at Macworld, especially as I explored the metaphor of the serfs dragging the Horse in. I described these as the enterprise workers usurping the IT department and playing their role in deciding how they should work with available technologies, as you can see from screenshot here:

Later when the beast has come to a halt, the city leaders inspect it (pictured below), and I described these as being the C level personnel: CEO, CTO, CMO, CFO etc, all somewhat flummoxed by the appearance of this beast, little knowing what was in store for them.

At the conclusion of the video, I use various rotate, scale and motion path effects to create the images of the Horse basically taking a crap using iPads, metaphorically suggesting the iPad would crap all over its competition, as well as making the early naysayers (neighsayers?) look like horses’ asses.

As I read the various reviews of the iPad 2, there is a curious dichotomy.

One group expresses disappointment that iPad 2 didn’t go far enough in improving upon iPad 1, yet their suggestions as to what ought to have changed are the same old laments: no USB, no Flash, not 128GB, and the all too familiar wail of Apple’s closed garden.

Others are delighted to see the evolution of the iPad with its cameras, new form, and improved processing power. I fall into the latter camp, and look forward to seeing if my predictions of parity between the two Keynotes come about due to these improvements which now doubt will occur on an annual basis.

In fact, I fully expect Keynote on the iPad to one day have unique features not in the desktop version which might make some consider it as their primary presentation creation tool. Now that would truly fulfill the role of the Trojan Horse!

6 Comments

Posted in iPad, iWork, Powerpoint, Presentation Skills, tablet

2010 in review

Posted on January 2, 2011 | 1 comment

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 76,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 3 days for that many people to see it.

 

In 2010, there were 38 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 77 posts. There were 101 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 35mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was December 20th with 3 views. The most popular post that day was Excitement and anticipation builds for Keynote users expecting iWork 11’s release on January 6.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were macsurfer.com, macdailynews.com, keynoteuser.com, google.co.th, and web.mac.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for iwork 10, mad scientist, iwork 10 release date, keynote vs powerpoint, and keynote vs powerpoint 2010.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Excitement and anticipation builds for Keynote users expecting iWork 11’s release on January 6 December 2010
7 comments

2

When will the next iWork be released? Very soon if Apple follow its own history… And some Keynote 6 predictions. December 2009
11 comments

3

Powerpoint 2010 takes it up to Apple’s Keynote – the game of leapfrog is truly on! July 2009
6 comments

4

For those who don’t get why Gizmodo is in deep trouble, imagine if the iPhone prototype was a new model Honda about to be released. For the truly challenged, eat some breakfast first – it improves learning, at least in schoolchildren. April 2010
39 comments

5

Keynote on the iPad: Curious minds wish to know how many are playing with Keynote for the first time, and how many are Windows users. It might tells us why Keynote has disappointed so many April 2010
4 comments

1 Comment

Posted in iWork, Powerpoint, Presentation Skills, tablet

Excitement and anticipation builds for Keynote users expecting iWork 11’s release on January 6

Posted on December 19, 2010 | 16 comments

Apple’s official announcement that its much anticipated “App Store” will “open” for business on January 6 brings with it much excitement in various Apple camps. These include of course developers themselves, many of whom will be hoping a bonanza awaits them, much like those who got in early for the iPhone apps store achieved.

The tech press, both mainstream and within the blogosphere, will also be watching closely, anticipating whether this is another Apple-led charge into a new retailing paradigm. No one who has watched the success of Apple’s bricks-and-mortar retailing environment will be quick to dismiss this next development in Apple’s reaching out to both developer and consumer alike.

But there’s another group, into which I place myself fair and square, who are anticipating January 6’s developments. I am writing of presenters who use slideware to aid their efforts to persuade their audiences of their sincerity and wisdom of their messages. How so?

Well, if rumours which have been circulating for several months hold to be true, we can expect Apple to showcase its own “apps” on opening day of the App Store.

In its own promotional material on its webpage, we see iWork 11 components used as examples of how the app store may appear. It shows each component in the current iWork – Keynote, Pages, and Numbers – for individual sale, as well as several fictitious apps.

As I have written elsewhere on this blog, Keynote is due for a major update. It’s truly been a long time to ask its adherents to wait patiently. This has been difficult to do as we watch Keynote’s advantages whittled away with excellent progress by the Microsoft Office team, both Mac and Windows. The Mac version looks suspiciously like Keynote, which is a form of compliment I suppose.

Its interface is still a dog’s breakfast however, and Microsoft’s engineers have yet to duplicate some of Keynote’s now very recognisable transitions and text builds, both in terms of their variations and smoothness.

The Keynote team have also been on the receiving end of much wished-for lists of improvements these past almost two years since Keynote 09 was released. For myself, rather than necessarily asking for specific components to be included, such as better sound management, I directly asked the team to consider how presentations themselves are undergoing changes.

When I spoke with them and gave a brief presentation, I wanted them to understand that future audiences would challenge old-style presenters (think all those text-driven, bullet-sodden Powerpoint slides you have come to dread) with demands for better recognition of audience needs:

1. how to get and keep audiences engaged;

2. how to draw out the essential message on a complex slide (using callouts);

3. how to better tell a visual story to support the spoken one such that the speaker remains the centre of the audience’s attention, until they willingly give it over to the slide’s content;

4. how to help presenters grab audience attention when there are so many distractions drawing attention away.

I tried to show the team how I think about achieving these presentation goals using the available tools in Keynote 09 in the hope it would stimulate their creative juices while they likely worked on the next version; and in the meantime kept sending examples of movie and television effects I saw which truly engaged me and which I wanted to see in the next Keynote, especially I struggled to duplicate the effects myself.

For instance, I would really like to see Keynote include the following effects I recorded at the Apple Store Chadstone, below, if we’re to get new effects.

In general, what I implored the team to not do was merely add more transitions and builds (although the effects above would be welcome), but move Keynote to another level of presentation style and capability.

In terms of the latter, there have been rumours of some kind of integration with the current AppleTV. I purchased one of these a few months ago, and have enjoyed using it with my iPad controlling it, rather than the slim remote it’s packaged with.

The thinking has been that Keynote presentations could be wireless transmitted through AppleTV to a data projector. Some kind of wireless connection would be welcome for presenters. As it is, I always take with me a 15 metre VGA-VGA cable and a connector so that I can position myself in the room where I choose to be, rather than stuck behind a lecturn where I am also confined by the connection to the data projector.

The problem currently is that AppleTV is HDMI-based, and very few data projectors use this connectivity currently. This will grow quickly in the next year, but for now VGA or RCA remains the predictable standard. I had hoped a conversion cable would help: HDMI out to RCA and VGA, but the projector (and an HD TV) I tried it with proved unsuccessful. Possibly, a firmware upgrade might allow this cable to work, but it seems un-Apple-like to go backwards or make concessions to what will inevitably be legacy connectivity methods.

Other possibilities come January 6 may include better sharing capabilities in the next Keynote. Microsoft’s Office touts exceptional online sharing and collaboration. Keynote currently is unable to share all of its glories when exporting to Powerpoint, “dumbing down” some of its most potent effects.

This is one area where those considering making the transition to the Mac – to best employ Keynote to make “unPowerpoint” presentations, if you get my drift – come unstuck when they need to share their presentations.

Hopefully, January 6 will also see some kind of beefed up iWork.com come out of beta and address these crucial shortcomings and reinforce Apple’s desire to reach further into the enterprise marketplace.

Mind you, Powerpoint is not without its problems here, with three version of Powerpoint (2010, 2007, and 2003) in common usage. I have too often seen 2007 presentations given over on USB to conference organisers, only to see the HP or Dell PCs in the conference room equipped with PPT 2003, yielding various blends of compatibility.

Moreover – and this applies to Keynote users too – those special fonts used to give your presentation some measure of “personality” will likely not be found on the PC or even the central server, and so the presentation is dumbed down and formatting and layout suffers to the point of incomprehensibility.

So all that said, we have several weeks to see if the iWork team have listened to their endusers, allowed themselves to have their creative heads, and foresee the need for presentation software to move to another level by equipping we endusers with tools to match what today’s audiences demand when they are asked to sit for an extended period of time.

I am hoping that not just have they listened, but they will delight us with unexpected gifts, which have us slapping our foreheads with, “Of course!”

We saw this two years ago with the Magic Move transition, which I hope will be improved upon. If I permit myself to list a few “hoped for” capabilities, it would include:

1. Much improved audio and video within-slide editing, including for the latter rotation, masking and perspective options.

2. Timeline – please, an Apple-like Timeline.

3. I expect to see much improved and out of the ballpark animation and 3D effects. These have been coming a long time, visible in the iOS interface. I include some variant of Coverflow, so as to allow better arrangement of objects on a slide.

4. Closer parity between Desktop and iPad versions of Keynote.

For myself, it looks like it will be a very busy three weeks between January 6 and my presentation at Macworld on January 26 as I come to grips with hoped-for updated and new features. At least it won’t be a repeat of Macworld 2009 when Keynote 09 was released the day before my two day workshop!

16 Comments

Posted in iWork, Powerpoint, Presentation Skills

Will a new iWork and iLife be revealed at this week’s Apple “Back to the Mac” event? It had better in the case of Keynote – Powerpoint has caught up, believe it or not…

Posted on October 17, 2010 | 20 comments

When all eyes and ears turn to Cupertino this Wednesday for Apple’s “Back to the Mac” event,  observers will have their own agendas they’ll be following in the hope that Apple reveals something of interest to them.

Users of Apple’s iLife and iWork suites of applications will be looking especially closely at what will be released. iLife is surely one of Apple’s jewels in the crown for its consumer Macs, providing Mac users with a value proposition unmatched in the Windows world. Each of the apps integrates with the other, and represents “as good as it gets” software solutions which come bundled with each new Mac.

To achieve better outcomes of a professional standard means leaping to an expensive Pro set of suites, such as the Final Cut Studio. It represents a huge leap above the domestic iLife which for many people including some professionals, represents “good enough” computing.

Apple’s office suite, iWork, used to come bundled with all new Macs as a 30day fully functional demo, only requiring purchasing a serial number online to allow continued full use after that trial period elapses. That bundling stopped some time ago, and it’s now a 500MB download for those who want to use it in demo mode.

Both iWork for the Mac and iLife were last updated in January 2009, when Phil Schiller performed Apple’s last keynote at Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

During this time iWork’s principal competition, Microsoft Office, has recently updated to Office 2010 for Windows, and a few days after the Back to the Mac will update to Office 2011 for the Macintosh.

Should iWork not be updated, it will be a strange reversal where Apple products are named in an outdated fashion, while Microsoft is ahead. But the stars are aligning which strongly suggest both Apple suites will be updated this coming week.

The blogosphere has begun reporting back dating on iWork/iLife orders, a usually reliable sign of updates on their way. We know a new Keynote version is out there, starting in January this year when Steve Jobs revealed the iPad and we saw new Keynote builds.

The stopping of the .Mac service on November 8 (not just the ability to update its content, but now to access it at all) suggests MobileMe, iWork.com and iWeb will see significant updates, hopefully with new functionality including sharing and social networking aptitudes.

More importantly, with updates to Microsoft’s Office suite, Apple must improve its iWork suite very very soon. iWork’s jewel in the crown, Keynote – the only Apple product Steve Jobs telegraphs by his use of it that an update is upcoming – has been caught and in some areas of functionality, surpassed by Powerpoint, both in Windows and Mac versions.

I’ve played with both, and the luring of Windows users to the Mac via Keynote’s superb media and font handling is now no longer feasible – Powerpoint has caught up that much. Mind you it’s caught up by adopting an incredible amount of Keynote’s look and feel. Even if it feels like a nightmare to navigate around its interface which lacks simplicity and kindness to new users.

In the Mac version, it has several features which exceed the functions of Keynote. It allows movies to be dropped in, framed and angled while Keynote remains flat by comparison. Yes, you can rotate movies, but its current editing capability is poor by comparison. Take a look below at the screenmovie I created in beta showing me manipulating Powerpoint’s media controls.

Powerpoint has its own advanced Masking abilities, and has cleverly found a way to visualise and control layers on a single slide, something Keynote is currently deficient in… how the Keynote team didn’t include some kind of Coverflow ability to move through a slide’s layers is beyond my understanding. Here’s how Powerpoint 2011 does it, below, using a ppt file I downloaded:

(Curiously, in his Wall Street Journal review, Walt Mossberg describes this effect of seeing a slide’s layers as Powerpoint’s ability to “dynamically reorder PowerPoint slides in a 3-D view”. I wonder how closely he actually played with Powerpoint, as I have described this as a feature unique to Powerpoint.)

Another important differentiator is Powerpoint’s ability to better employ its presenter mode. So overlooked by Windows users for whom setting up a second monitor has traditionally been a pain and because convention organisers give you a monitor to work in mirror mode, presenter mode allows you to see the current slide (the one your audience is viewing) as well as the next slide’s next build on your Mac or PC. I can’t tell you how many times in Presentation Magic workshops I have revealed how I don’t use notes because I know the story coming up on the next slide. Even experienced presenters sometimes are unaware of this facility. On the Mac, you can swap displays in presenter mode, such that your audience now sees what you see on the Mac. There is no reason to do so of course unless you are teaching how to use Keynote or now, Powerpoint.

But Powerpoint now goes several steps further. It actually plays the current slide in presenter mode, while in Keynote it remains static, even if a movie is playing. The slide ready to progress bar, which is green when Keynote is ready to go to the next slide, and red when it is in the middle of a transition or build and can’t progress, in Powerpoint is replaced by a green progress bar, which gives immediate visual feedback about how far through your slide deck you’ve come.

A third difference is restarting your countdown timer. On the Mac, to restart the timer, you need to escape the presentation, and start again. In Powerpoint 2011, there is a restart arrow to zero and begin the counter once more (as will advancing to the next slide).

In the screen shot below, you can see all these elements at work, plus Powerpoint’s ability to, on the fly, adjust slide note font size, and add notes to the next slide, which might be useful if asked questions during your presentations or as a personal reminder for a presentation debrief about which slides worked and which didn’t – strongly recommended, by the way.

Mind you, Powerpoint’s presenter view lacks many of the preference settings Keynote 09 possesses, and I could not locate a means to countdown your slide show, ie. time remaining rather than elapsed time. Additionally, Powerpoint as well as its siblings in Office 2011, all perpetuate the use of a floppy disk icon to signal the “Save” command, something an eighteen year old freshman has probably never seen in his or her computing lifetime!

I’ll have more to say about this and other UI elements of Microsoft products in a forthcoming blog entry.

Finally, as much as I praise Powerpoint 2011 (if only to facetiously place a rocket where it belongs) its builds and animation are lame by comparison to Keynote. It still can’t do a proper slow dissolve which Keynote 1.0 achieved in 2003, and its collection of transitions, while attempting to emulate Keynote (I am so tired of seeing Cube transitions – get over it already), looks better matched to your basic Windows Movie Maker software to show the holiday movies, than a professional presentation software meant to persuade people to either part with their money, or change the way they think.

So, will iWork be updated this week? Well, the gap between iWork 08, released August 7, 2008 and iWork 09, released January 6, 2009 is 16 months. If it’s released this week, iWork 11 (if that’s what it will be called) will be 22 months in the baking – that’s a heck of a long time when you have Office breathing down your neck, as well as open source office apps, not to mention non-linear Flash-based Prezi.

Keynote needs now to step up to the plate, integrate better with its baby brother on the iPad (I’m sure this is part of the plan) and move to a new level, leaving Powerpoint in its wake as just another slideshow app.

I’ve been sending the Keynote team screen movies of effects I’ve either created or viewed in movies, on TV, or on the web. News and current affairs programs in particular are marvellous sources of engaging visuals, from The Daily Show with John Stewart, through to Rachel Maddow as well as PBS, BBC and History Channel specials.

The kind of effects these programs employ is what 2011 audiences will expect. No longer do audiences passively drift off into imagination when bored and disengaged, they actively pursue other attention-grabbing activities on their iPhones and iPads and Blackberries, making the task of holding their concentration even more difficult in 2011.

Keynote can now leap ahead if only Steve Jobs has allowed the team to exercise their imaginations. Not everyone wants to present like Steve, as good as he is at demonstrating Apple’s products and vision. Not all presentations are simple exercises in placing huge text in iStockphoto cliched visuals.

There is a world of science communicators ready to move to another non-Powerpoint level (you would shudder to think how many top scientists and academics still use Powerpoint for Windows 2003) in order to communicate within their communities and just as importantly to those outside their depth of knowledge, but who have the power to help science advance or to withhold funds and stifle pure research to all our detriment.

Yes, I think it’s that important that we find better ways to communicate complex ideas in 2011, and I will be bitterly disappointed if:

1. Keynote is not updated very soon, preferably this week,

and

2. it’s just another point update, with a few more transitions and build effects.

The presentation world and its audience deserves better.

20 Comments

Posted in iWork, Powerpoint, Presentation Skills

Useful resources for presenters from the design field: Smashing Magazine’s 25 useful design videos and presentations

Posted on August 16, 2010 | 2 comments

Even regular presenters  do well to pay attention to others in their field.

You can pick up new ideas about familiar subjects, new subjects presented in a familiar way, and new ideas presented in unfamiliar fashions! Those of us who, like I, use the cognitive neurosciences to inform their presentation skills do well to give attention to those in the design field, and vice-versa in order to advance their skills.

So for me, in addition to my newsfeeds of psychological topics, I also have a selection of design feeds. Most of these are not about presentations per se, but about design in general, in particular user interface designs as well as advertisements. I incorporate fun and hopefully engaging segments on both of these in my Presentation Magic workshops.

Today, one of my design feeds, Smashing Magazine, has a series of presentation videos featuring some of the world’s most established and accomplished designers telling and illustrating their stores. In a weblog entry entitled, 25 useful videos and presentations for designers, we see in action a litany of great designers. It’s too soon in my sampling process to highlight any one or two of interest to presenters; far be it for me to tell you what might influence your design aspirations!

Please go take a look, and use the comments section to start a discussion of what you liked and can recommend to other readers.

One of the other design feeds I regular read is that of Common Craft, a site that explains in very simple ways complex ideas. This weekend it published a link to a gestalten.tv video looking at the design of graphics for the New York Times website.

Its graphcis editor, Archie Tse is interviewed, and here is a choice quote:

At the Times, we generally err on the side of clarity, versus aesthetic. The simplicity we try to achieve is an aesthetic in itself.

You can see the video here. Gestalten.tv also has an iTunes presence which you can subscribe to and keep updated.

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Posted in Presentation Skills

Why Apple needs to strike hard and fast to make Keynote the dominant presentation software in colleges and other institutes of education – it can be done in the next five years despite Powerpoint’s undeserved current dominance.

Posted on August 14, 2010 | 15 comments

In my last several posts, I’ve asked you to observe with me a changing landscape for presentations, in particular how the nature of audiences is forcing a shift towards visually-rich media.

Some of the research I have cited argues that a new generation is coming through who have grown up with the internet, especially broadband, which can deliver media in different ways than it was for their parents for whom dialup was the standard, as was your traditional text- and bullet-point driven Powerpoint stacks in college and the boardroom.

Young people coming through the ranks have grown up creating their own media, using devices like Apple’s iMovie and publishing it on YouTube and Facebook for friends and strangers to share.

Other social media like Slideshare have allowed academics and authors to upload their presentations and while many old-fashioned slide stacks still abound, it’s clear that they simply won’t catch the attention of younger viewers.

We are also seeing more and more mainstream media articles challenging Powerpoint’s dominance as the major channel for delivering knowledge and blogs such as mine and Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen asking for a rethink of the evidence behind engaging and persuasive message delivery.

While I like this blog to be as useful to a Powerpoint user as it is to an Apple Keynote user, I want to suggest that Apple is now primed to take a leadership position in helping the knowledge sharing process with a much more active and aggressive promotion of Keynote to an audience who is primed to receive and act on this message: College students and staff.

Recent surveys suggest the Macintosh, the only platform Keynote runs on, is making serious inroads as the platform of choice for many students and faculty.

In March, 2008, Appleinsider published the following:

Apple’s rapidly rising mindshare amongst current generation college students is setting the company up for an “aging phenomenon” that will spur further market share and revenue growth as those students enter the work force, investment bank Morgan Stanley said Wednesday.

A recent higher-education survey cited by analyst Katy Huberty reveals that roughly 40 percent of college students say their next computer purchase will be a Mac, well ahead of Apple’s current 15 percent market share in the demographic.

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog last week offered a more recent statistical analysis:

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, quoting survey results from Student Monitor:

“Among those who planned to purchase a new computer, 87% planned to buy a laptop. And among those students 47% planned to buy a Mac.”

Among student laptop owners, Apple has the highest share, at 27 percent. These numbers are short of the claim by analyst Trip Chowdhry that “70% of incoming University freshman students are coming with Macs”, but they’re still remarkable, and the trend is very strong in Apple’s favor.

At one time, Apple bundled its iWork office suite on all laptops as fully-operational demo software, which was operational for 30 days before it require the purchase online of a serial number.

It’s time for Apple to give serious thought to returning to this bundling for students. It’s also time for Apple’s online tutorials about iWork to shift to how academics can use Keynote especially in the sciences with its need often for special formulas, equations and graphs.

It’s clear to me also that the boardroom is still slavishly devoted to Powerpoint. But the trojan horse here will be those graduates who have used Apple’s laptops all their college lives, who have become au fait with Keynote as their preferred choice of multimedia knowledge sharing tool – even in MBA courses – and who will soon be entering junior then senior levels of management. It might take five years, but the statistics I’ve cited suggest a change is already underway, and it’s there for Apple to capitalise on.

Despite great improvements in the current and forthcoming versions of Powerpoint (much of it emulating or playing catchup to Keynote), there is still a huge legacy of basically awful Powerpoint for these new versions to overcome. Keynote users, in my observations, have rarely had this allegiance to old style, no evidence for it, styles of presenting now so much out of favour by those who make a study of knowledge transfer. But it’s a long way to go.

With the expected uptake of the iPad in academia and business, with its specialised Keynote app and maybe a new desktop version of Keynote, and you have a prefect storm of change brewing.

I’m guessing the next version of Keynote is in the oven almost cooked, just waiting for the sprinkles to be added before its release. Hopefully it will leapfrog Powerpoint 2010 (Windows) and 2011 (Mac). But what needs to be done also by Apple is to really ramp up its thrust into these important territories where significant change is occurring for which Keynote with its media rich properties is tailor made and a much better fit than default Powerpoint, even in its latest incarnations.

I’m hoping Apple can return its gaze for the next little while to the desktop/laptop application market place, and drive home the platform’s advances and advantages. I want Apple to especially offer a means for those in academia, student, teacher and researcher alike, to learn new ways of knowledge transfer in a manner that better suits the evidence base for how humans learn.

My visits to Apple HQ in Cupertino as well as iWork teams in Pittsburgh where I presented emphasised this shift; I am truly hopeful my message was received and applied in the next imminent version of Keynote, and beyond.

UPDATE: Even Bill Gates says so, sort of…

Gates acknowledged in a recent talk how the world of online education may well surpass traditional education in the next five years. Even more reason to get with the program of improving academic instructional training with appropriate tools and methods. Here is Engadget’s reporting:

Bill Gates just might be the world’s most famous college dropout (sorry, Kanye), but lest you think he’s changed his mind about the educational establishment, he’s got a few words of reassurance for you. As the closing speaker of the Techonomy 2010 conference, Bill dished out his vision of how learning will evolve over the next few years, stating his belief that no single university will be able to match the internet when it comes to providing the learning resources a student needs. Describing traditional studies as “place-based” and inefficient, he forecasts that university education will become five times less important within five years, with online lecture sources picking up the reins of enlightening our youth

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Posted in iWork, Powerpoint, Presentation Skills, tablet

More mainstream media evidence that presentation skills need to enter the 21st Century – looking at generational divides and why default Powerpoint won’t cut it.

Posted on August 11, 2010 | 3 comments

Many Presentation Magic readers and workshop attendees will know that I am always on the lookout for evidence for how presentations are changing to suit changing times.

Often, technologies and shifting economies drive the need for presentations to alter, especially when audiences shift in their desires to be informed and entertained.

The last week I have come across three mainstream media articles I wish to share with you now to reinforce the message that audiences are changing and the standard default means of delivering messages via slideshows  – the so-called Cognitive Style of Powerpoint – no longer cuts it.

Media Evidence #1: The Age – Education Liftout, August 2, 2010

Each Monday the Melbourne newspaper of record, The Age, publishes an Education Age liftout looking at all things education, right across the age range.

There is also a blog attached to the section, known as Third Degree. Last week, its author, Erica Cervini, penned an article entitled, Let me entertain you, where she reviewed some British educational research into how students evaluated their tertiary lecturers. The research, by University of Hertfordshire lecturers, Mark Russell and Helen Barefoot, suggested that students want more from their lecturers: they want them to be edutainers, lecturers “who can mix education with entertainment”.

Now this is not the first time I have heard this term used. In my Presentation Magic workshop, I will often refer to unusual places where presentations take place. In one case, I refer to a Fort Lauderdale cruise company, who places entertainers on board cruise ships. Their task is to nightly entertain patrons with illustrated talks on a variety of subjects, from the food they will encounter at the next port of call, to other more esoteric subjects. Above all else, their publicity blurb says… well, here’s the section on the webpage for you to read:

The link to read more of this service, and maybe apply is here.

A few more choice quotes from the Education Age article:

The academics found that students commended their tutors and lecturers for motivating them and for being a ”great person”. ”He is a legend with an incredible sense of humour,” one student wrote.

The students also rated highly a lecturer’s ability to ”edutain” them. They described their classes as ”fun” and ”enjoyable”.

”As a student I look forward to his lectures, his charisma and dynamic teaching style are a breath of fresh air,” one student wrote. ”He adds flair and humour to his teaching making learning difficult subjects seem a little easier.”

Now there will be many a lecturer who will shudder at “giving in” to the whims of students, who can be very capricious with their desires and what they think is good for their education. Unfortunately, particularly at the undergraduate level, students have insufficient depth of subject knowledge nor knowledge of their own learning styles to drive the means by which they can best learn.

Post graduate students, perhaps because they’ve been around a lot longer and are more motivated to turn their education into a career, may be more circumspect about what makes for a good lecturer.

Let me finish this first part of the blog entry with some fine quotes from the Age article:

Lecturers are also being trained to think they have to be edutainers by those in charge of university teaching awards. Australian universities also ask students to nominate tutors and lecturers for teaching awards.

In many universities students only have a minor role in saying who should win the awards. It’s the academics who have the big say. Once they accept their nomination, the lecturers then write a mini-thesis boasting why they should win the best teacher prize.

What are they going to say? That they suffer from a personality bypass and eschew all technological wizardry in the lecture theatre?

The Hertfordshire academics will be presenting their research at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning conference in October.

You can see Erica’s blog article here.

Media Evidence #2: The Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Liftout, August 2, 2010

In an blog article, entitled, “Why is it the the older you are the more you can’t stand ‘Inception'”, writer Patrick Goldstein muses about the Christopher Nolan film, Inception, and how he believes it is dividing audiences.

He writes of discussing the film with “an old Hollywood hand” who had seen the film at a private screening with other senior “elder statesmen” of the film profession, along with their much younger children.

Here is what he wrote:

After the movie was over, the industry elders were shaking their heads in disbelief, appalled by the film’s lack of clarity, having been absolutely unable to follow the film’s often convoluted story.

But before anyone could register their complaints, one of the younger people on hand, flush with excitement, praised the film to the rooftops. To him, it was such a thrill ride that if the projectionist could show the film again, he’d sit through it again right away.

And after discussing Inception’s box office success, Goldstein then writes:

But from the moment “Inception” was released, it was obvious from polling data that the movie had created both a critical and a generational divide. Some critics have raved about the film’s originality while others have mocked its excesses. If you were a young moviegoer, you loved the visually arresting puzzle-box thriller. But the older you got, according to polling data, the more likely you were to detest its run ‘n’ gun, dream-within-a-dream complexity.

I think by now you will be seeing the point of including this LA Times article in this entry about changing audiences and the need to understand how one’s presentation needs to address audience qualities.

Goldstein goes on to write that movies have often split audiences down generation lines, citing films which did not enjoy (older) critics’ admiration, such as Bonnie and Clyde, or A Clockwork Orange, both of which found success with younger audiences. (Goldstein discusses how the New York Times put its negative fill critic out of a job when he dissed Bonnie and Clyde).

Goldstein also cites the current youth orientation to social media which can give a film instant weekend buzz or kill it after the first day’s showing:

In the old days, the culture zeitgeist took much longer to coalesce. Now buzz is often instantaneous. “Inception’s” opening weekend was made up of young male zealots and Chris Nolan acolytes. By the time I saw it again last weekend at a local mall, the audience was full of a much broader cross section of moviegoers who simply wanted to find out what the excitement was all about.

But the paragraph if his very good blog article that should be of most interest to presenters aware of their own audience generational gap comes in one of his mid-section paragraphs:

If “Inception” plays especially strongly with a young audience, it’s probably because they instinctively grasp its narrative density best, having grown up playing video games. “When it comes to understanding ‘Inception,’ you’ve got a real advantage if you’re a gamer,” says Henry Jenkins, who’s a professor of communications, journalism and cinematic arts at USC. ” ‘Inception’ is first and foremost a movie about worlds and levels, which is very much the way video games are structured. Games create a sense that we’re a part of the action. Stories aren’t just told to us. We experience them.”

Let me write that last sentence again for you:

Stories aren’t just told to us. We experience them.

This reinforces a message I have given over and over again  in my workshops, with evidence. We are hard wired to listen to and tell stories. Great presenters evoke those brain actions that bring audience attention to bear, such that they feel involved in what the presenter is saying and doing. If you simply fill your slides with words, expecting your audience to follow along as you read them, you are not engaging in audience involvement. You are engaging in audience affront.

There are times I know when I’m presenting where I see quizzical looks on the faces of my audience. They don’t know where I’m going with my current slide and its story, a “Huh?” moment. When they see the connection, they have an “Aha!” moment, and the next time it happens (which is often), they are better prepared but just as eager to see how the mystery of what I’m doing will be resolved, just like a magician when he or she performs their tricks, especially when they require considerable “setup”.

As the session goes on, this game of “Huh? Aha!” becomes involving and enjoyable, and helps get my message across. It’s why I often stop and allow small group conversation to take place before moving on to another section of my workshop. Let me allow Patrick Goldstein to conclude this part of my blog entry:

Even though the density of “Inception” can be off-putting to older moviegoers, it’s a delicious challenge for gamers. “With ‘Inception,’ if you blink or if your mind wanders, you miss it,” says Jenkins. “You’re not sitting passively and sucking it all in. You have to experience it like a puzzle box. It’s designed for us to talk about, to share clues and discuss online, instead of having everything explained to us. Part of the pleasure of the movie is figuring out things that don’t come easily, which is definitely part of the video game culture.”

Media Evidence #3: The Australian – Education section, August 11, 2010

If the Age brings out its Education section on Monday, its competitor, the Australian brings out a much larger section devoted to tertiary education on a Wednesday.

Today’s section caught my eye because I’ve been thinking about this blog article for a few days, readying myself for writing. Because I so often talk about presenting in threes (related to not getting an audience to go into cognitive overload by having them hold more than three concepts in working memory), this third piece of evidence compelled me to get this blog article written.

It features a story by Jeremy Gilling, entitled, Three minutes to present a life-changing thesis.

It features PhD student, Jayanthi Maniam from the University of Sabah in Malaysia, and her work in medical science supervised by Australian professor, Margaret Morris from the University of New South Wales.

Maniam’s thesis revolves around research into rat metabolism, as a model for understanding human behaviour, especially in the area of early life trauma and food choices, particularly, so-called “comfort food”, high in sugar and tasty fats.

Here is how the article sums up her testing of her central hypothesis:

The results support the hypothesis that the behavioural deficit associated with early-life trauma can be reversed by (two) forms of behaviour, exercise and eating comfort food.

Naturally, if you’re a health scientist, you’d be inclined to recommend exercise over comfort food. As you’d expect, Maniam’s thesis is heavily technical, not just describing the experiments she undertook, but also the neuroscience underpinning her hypotheses and results.

What caught my eye however was Maniam’s entry into her university’s “trials for the annual three minute thesis competition, which allows postgraduate research students from universities across Australasia to present their topic to a lay audience in a manner that is engaging, informative and as comprehensive as the time permits.” (Bold added).

What a challenge! Two or three years of research and write-up boiled down to its essence and delivered to a lay audience! This puts TED talks to shame, with their 18 minute limit!

The article then discusses Mariam’s reaction to her talk:

(She) found the competition challenging and stimulating: “Scientists generally aren’t all that skilled at explaining their work and the benefits it brings to the community… It’s important (scientists) learn to communicate to diverse audiences.”

She regards the competition as a good training ground in communication, especially with young people: “That’s where we have to start if we’re going to spark their interest in science.”

(The research cited is in the June issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology)

And so we see a further piece of evidence hinting at the nature of presentations, the emphasis on making them engaging, and trying to reach an audience of young people who might otherwise be turned off by dour text-laden slides without a cohesive story to engage them.

Having only three minutes to tell your story will surely sharpen anyone’s storytelling abilities, and cut to the chase quickly and resolutely.

In summary – audience needs are changing

When I see more and more of these stories entering the mainstream media highlighting an urgent need for those in positions of knowledge sharing to sharpen their game, it stirs me even more to try and get my Presentation Magic information out there, whether via this blog, or my workshops.

In a follow up article, I’ll argue why Apple with its Keynote software is in an excellent position to take advantage of this shift.

UPDATE: One of my professional RSS feeds, PsychCentral, yesterday featured an article by Rick Nauert PhD, entitled Medical School Education from Video Games?

In it, Nauert discusses research from an online edition of BMC Medical Education, a journal devoted to open access to peer reviewed research.

The article is entitled, Medical Student attitudes towards video games and related new media technologies in medical technologies, by Kron et al.

One of the centres which conducted the research, the University of Michigan, has released a media release which gives a good coverage to the highlights here.

This article caught my eye because it too reinforces my main proposition that a new generation is coming through the ranks for whom the standard Powerpoint will no longer do the job, and needs to be abandoned. Here are a few choices quotes:

The study helps dispel the stereotype of video games as the exclusive purview of adolescent loners. Instead they may be used as advanced teaching tools that fit an emerging learning style, authors say.

“Due in large part to their high degree of technological literacy, today’s medical students are a radically different audience than the students of 15 to 20 years ago,” former medical educator and president of Medical Cyberworlds, Inc. Frederick W. Kron, M.D., says of the so-called millenial generation. “They are actually more comfortable in image-rich environments than with text.”

Their clear preference is for active, first-person, experiential learning and a level of interactivity that is absent in traditional lectures, but vibrantly present in new media technologies. Thus, the growing movement towards using new media and serious games in education fits well with Millennial medical students’ learning styles.

And further along:

“Academic leadership has called for innovative methods to enhance how medical students access the concepts that they need to become doctors,” says Kron, former assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin. “New media technologies developed by the video game industry hold great promise to helping educators to meet that critical mandate.”

PS I have two blog entries in the holding pattern, waiting to finish them. I assure, you it will be worth the wait.

3 Comments

Posted in Powerpoint, Presentation Skills

More evidence that the cognitive style of Powerpoint is a thing of the past – evidence from museums and art galleries

Posted on June 29, 2010 | 3 comments

I have a new breakfast habit each morning.

Since I purchased my 64GB/3G iPad last week, I now take it with me to breakfast where I read the day’s newspapers on real paper (supplied by the cafe) while the iPad sits at the side of the table, open to email or twitter so I can get my day off and running.

This morning’s Age newspaper’s Arts and Style section contained an interesting article on art galleries and museums, and their curation. In the last few years, the Macintosh User group of which I’m currently President has continued a relationship with the featured museum, Museum Melbourne following an exhibition we participated and helped curate about the history of Apple computers. You can see some of it here.

Today’s Age article, called The Evolving Art of Assembly, featured interviews with Juliana Engberg who is the Artistic Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and Melbourne Museum’s senior curator, Kate Phillips. You can read the full article from the Age here.

The essence of the article reveals how these two curators in their own styles are radicalising museum exhibiting in order to keep museums relevant in an age of social media and so-called information overload.

Here’s how the article describes Engberg’s work:

For Engberg, (the) process of assembling – ideas, people, work, concepts – has changed radically in the past couple of decades. The days when gallery-goers were content to wander, pausing by a canvas here, an information panel there, catalogue in hand, are long gone. The internet, blogs, social networking tools and myriad forms of multimedia mean we now engage and interact with art in constantly changing ways.

Kate Phillips’ work was described this way by the article’s author, Liza Power:

Curiously, for a place most people associate with ”do not touch” signs, Phillips says the biggest revolution in museum curation in recent years has come from making displays immersive and touchable.

”Kids are exposed to so much media from their earliest years now,” she says. ”They use computers, the internet, they’re accustomed to very sophisticated visual communication.” To engage them, museums have had to up the ante.

Does this sound familiar to Presentation Magic readers and workshop attendees? Of course! It’s the recognition that the display of information, whether it be on screen, on paper, or in a gallery or museum, must attend to the peculiar needs of the humans who will attend. And that whichever means you decide to choose to convey ideas needs to address that peculiar human trait of “engagement” if you’re to be successful in achieving your purpose.

In terms of presentation skills, it’s more evidence from unusual sources that the traditional way of presenting information – what has come to be called the Cognitive Style of Powerpoint – no longer cuts it with most generations, but in particular with younger generations whose media world of information is so interactive and visually rich.

How you keep your audience involved and engaged is the secret to great presenting, not just presenting a message of importance.

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Posted in Presentation Skills

Presentation Magic presents to a Coaching audience which includes military Powerpoint users: funny stories of how they deal with the usual “Death by Powerpoint”

Posted on June 6, 2010 | 5 comments

I gave a half-day Presentation Magic workshop to about 50 members of the Australian Psychological Society’s Interest group in Coaching Psychology on the weekend. (See the flyer APS IGCP workshop flyer)

Rather than giving them a cut down version of the two day or even one day course of training I offer (such as at Macworld), I gave the introduction session which outlines the essential problems with most presentation nowadays, especially if they follow the traditional style of powerpoint most favoured by academics and within the enterprise setting.

I emphasised the evidence base for a better way to present complex information, and tried out a few new slides for the first time in preparation for an upcoming training I’m offering to a major hospital in Los Angeles next month.

In the audience were many who worked in training for organisations, including the military. Even in Australia, the military perversion of powerpoint training persists, at least as far as I was told by two female staffers at my presentation’s end.

They were fully aware of the demoralising impact of the standard means of information transfer which occurs within military training, and it seems there are times when presenters merely take powerpoint slides developed by others in the military hierarchy and then deliver it without much personal investment. Quite different from my situation where I may be commissioned to do training, then develop the slides and supporting material (handouts, exercises, etc) myself.

One of the military trainers who acknowledged how boring some of these presentation in the Australian Defense Forces (ADF) can be told me it was SOP (standard operating procedure) for soldiers attending presentations, to begin to full asleep whereupon if this begins to happen too frequently, they are permitted, nay expected, to leave their seat and moved to the back of the class to stand up in order to stave off sleep!

In other circumstances, it is permitted to elbow one’s seated colleague in the ribs if they are seen to be falling asleep.

When I asked if this acceptable response to presentation giving is likely to change, the response was that with younger troops enlisting, the ADF was giving thought to recognising that expecting staff to attend presentations (and attend to presentations) needed to be rethought in terms of the style of presenting, ie., a move away from the cognitive style of powerpoint which still dominates especially in hierarchical organisations.

A couple of other humorous discoveries:

1. A number of people stopped me during the presentation to ask what software I was using. This is pretty common when I present to general groups, as compared to Macintosh-specific users. These questioners recognise I am not using Powerpoint (either for Mac or Windows), and some have never heard of Keynote. Such individuals usually work in the enterprise setting, while the self-employed seem to have some awareness of Apple’s offerings.

2. A few people actually asked specifically (during a break) if I was using Keynote. When I asked them why the question, their response was along these lines: “I’ve now been to two (or three) presentations and have been really taken by the change of style and the visual richness of the slides which really engaged me. On both (or three) occasions, the presenter said they were using Keynote.”

3. In the corporate world, the cognitive style of powerpoint still dominates, but there is an increasing acknowledgement that it simply isn’t working and more and more people are turning off and disengaging when they see a laptop and data projector when they enter a training room. They are hungry for change, but simply don’t know how, even though they have a sense of why.

4. I’ll post the workshop evaluations once they’re analysed and sent to me. I’m as curious as you are.

5. Finally, the person who approached me to run this workshop, and stuck her neck out in her belief in me, had asked me in the week before if I would send her a further note she could publish to perhaps get a few more people to enrol. Here’s what I wrote that apparently saw an extra 15 people enrol:

“This workshop will challenge many assumptions psychologists make about presentations, and use highly engaging and entertaining means to demonstrate how best to present to a variety of audiences, using cutting edge awareness of cognitive neuroscience as well as decades-old social conformity theory.

It might sound dry, but Les is invited regularly to the US to give his workshops, something akin to selling ice to Eskimos! You’ll be talking with your friends about this workshop in the weeks after, and wondering if there will be a part 2 to the workshop.”

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Posted in Presentation Skills