Explore the art and science of presentation design thinking and ideas from the world of storytelling. Learn how to apply principles from the “Presentation Zen” design philosophy to remake a tired presentation into something an audience can really connect with.
Let's face it. Presentation software (e.g., Microsoft's PowerPoint, Apple's Keynote, and others like Prezi) is a de facto classroom teaching technology. Publishers bundle pre-authored chapter summary PowerPoint slide decks with their textbooks, students clamour for copies of your slides, every meeting room at every conference (STLHE included) is set up with a data projector, a screen, and a computer capable of delivering a presentation. Presentation software is ubiquitous in higher education but it is rarely used as effectively as it could be. The purpose of this workshop is transform your thinking about presentations -- to give you the tools to put more "power" into your "PowerPoint"!
Using design principles from best selling authors Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen, The Naked Presenter) and Nancy Duarte (slide:ology, resonate) plus ideas from others like Edward Tufte (The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information), we will do just that -- transform our presentations. It is important to stress that the CONTENT of the presentations doesn't change, only the DELIVERY of the content changes. Like the notion of the conservation of energy from physics: "Content is neither created nor destroyed through the presentation zenification process."
The first part of the workshop deals with the technical side of this transformation -- recasting the design of our slide materials. This is a BYOD (bring your own device) hands-on workshop. The device you bring (laptop / tablet) should be capable of editing / authoring presentations, not just displaying them. Also bring a presentation or two that you don't mind sharing with others and having dissected in the name of presentation "zenficiation"!
After introducing various design ideas and walking through the redesign of a typical presentation using a "before & after" approach, we will get into the hands-on work where participants will re-work various aspects of their presentations using the principles and ideas from the first part of the workshop. Like Miss Fizzle of The Magic Schoolbus used to exclaim: "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy." We will do just that. The technical portion of the workshop will conclude with "show and tell" where participants will share aspects of their redesigned presentations with everyone in the workshop.
The final part of the workshop will bring the "zenfied" presentation back into the larger context of a typical university course. In the course of transforming our presentations, we can also transform our lectures from places where our students are passive PowerPoint "consumers" to more active and engaged learners. To this end, I will present a case study of a management science course that has transformed from a PowerPoint-only approach to course content to an eBook + presentation approach.