PowerPoint - Fantastic Resource by Karl Kapp - A Question

In response to the LCB Big Question - PowerPoint: What is Appropriate? When and Why? - Karl created a presentation and a blog post that is wonderful on many levels - not the least of which that his use of a slide presentation (PowerPoint) to provide insights into the topic itself.

At the same time it raised a bunch of questions for me that I asked as comments on his post. One of my questions was on the use of images. I took a look at a couple of other resources linked to by other people answering the Big Question and found that they helped the question become more concrete.

Take for example one of the slides being discussed in: http://www.sociablemedia.com/resources_webseminars.php4

was the topic of: "The pharmaceutical industry today is navigating a sea of change"

The advice was to use a picture of a compass (something similar to):



and you could either include the title or not. The final suggestion was to not include it.

What I wonder is - if a picture is worth a thousand words, but the 1,000 words it tells are different than what you intend the message to be, then what do you do?

The compass emphasizes the word "Navigate" and also implies sea. Probably not change. And certainly nothing to do with pharmaceuticals. We could also choose:


to emphasize "Sea of Change" ... or

to emphasize pharmaceuticals. I'm not sure what picture would actually convey the same 10 words that is the title. So, instead it's a visual cue around an important concept - but it would seem to really be aiming much more at the emotional content. Thus, maybe the picture of the stormy seas is much more appropriate than the picture of the compass.

Actually, if the only message here was that simple title, then I'm not sure I'd devote a whole slide to it anyhow.

In Karl's presentation, my question was around the use of images of the moon landing when the topic was "Technology defined the boomer generation" - or at least I think that was the topic - the problem is that all I remember is the picture of the moon landing.

I'm certainly going to use some of Karl's suggestions and go back and look at some slides and try to improve them.

But, it's tough to break old habits. :)

Blogs and Community

I just saw this post: Blogs as community killers? and the white paper Blogs in the CoP ecosystem.

Both are quite interesting in that they point to the fact that Blogs form a network that is loosely coupled and thus lack the cohesive, singular environment that many communities desire (think listservs).

This is something I've discussed before in lots of posts (see below). But the core of my feeling on this issue is that I build better relationships with individuals via Blogging than via listservs and what we really need is a way to create community on top of Blogging. See:

• Blogs, Community and Discussion Tracking - What's Really Needed
• Types of Blog Discussions

Other related posts:

• Community Blogs - Maybe I'm Finally Getting It
• Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community?
• eLearning Discussions - An Attempt at Better Discussions in the Blogosphere
• Move from Discussion Groups to World of Blogs?
• Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog
• I found it inside my blog reader!
• Blogs vs. Discussion Groups or Mis-Understanding Blog Reading and ...

PowerPoint - Seth's Booklet

Cognitive Load and PowerPoint pointed us to Seth Godin's free booklet Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it). A few of the points that Seth makes:

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help
them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you
are.)

You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts,
but you can’t complete it without emotion.

Create a written document. A leave-behind. Put in as many footnotes or
details as you like. Then, when you start your presentation, tell the audience
that you’re going to give them all the details of your presentation after it’s over,
and they don’t have to write down everything you say.

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional
reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to
say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think
of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).

I very much agree with Seth that there's a combination of information transfer and emotional transfer going on in any presentation. Otherwise (as he says) you could do this with a written document.

I'm not sure I'm 100% on-board with only having emotional content on the slide and promising a leave-behind but not giving it out so people feel confident that they will have the details they want.

Still it certainly is amazing food for thought.

PowerPoint Preparation is Good

This month's big question on the Use of PowerPoint has already sparked some discussion and some good links. We'll likely get agreement that PowerPoint itself is not evil, but poor use of PowerPoint is. However, I'd also want to add that in my experience presenters who don't use slides often don't do a good job providing information, they are often ill-prepared, seem to ramble through stories, don't necessarily draw it to a conclusion, and make it really hard on the audience to extract the meaning.

Now that I blog, I often sit at a presentation and capture notes that are of interest to me and that would be of interest to blog readers. What you quickly realize is that speakers who don't use slides are often very high on the inspiration, entertainment side of things, but they don't get into much content beyond very superficial statements. I've attended quite a few keynotes like that and even more panel sessions. There have been brilliant exceptions such as a recent Peter de Jaeger keynote on change management.

Karyn said that one of the best presentations she attended was someone who had created the PowerPoints and lost them. So, it was likely a great preparation tool. Which is a great point. PowerPoint forces you to think through the real message of the presentation. It's a great way to see if you are going to be successful getting it through.

I happen to also believe that seeing a list on a slide helps me (being a predominantly visual learner) feel comfortable that I'm getting the intended message of the speaker. A pretty picture with a story - did I get the point?

I'm looking forward to continued discussion on this topic.

Beer and Bloggers in Atlanta at ASTD

Continuing what has now become somewhat a tradition (see Beer Tasting at ASTD TechKnowledge, and Boston, Beer - Bloggers - Learn.com), I plan to informally get together with bloggers at the ASTD conference in Atlanta in June to go have a few beers. I just realized that's less than a month away. We'll do it on June 4th in the evening.

If you are planning to go to ASTD and you have a blog, drop me a comment. Or if you needed that extra little incentive to start a blog right now, this may be the trick.

Brandon Hall Network - Back from the Dead?

I just saw a post from Tim Sosbe -The “New” Network that tells us the following about the Brandon Hall Network, www.brandonhallnetwork.com....

We’ve been building this for a large part of the past year, constantly tweaking the service and offering new capabilities in order to make it the premier place for learning professionals and talent managers to collaborate, share resources and make new connections.

...

If you’ve read other blogs claiming the Network is dead, consider that a great exaggeration!

I feel somewhat bad because if you Google search "Brandon Hall Network" the results give you a couple of links to Brandon Hall and then links to a few of my past posts around the network such as: Brandon Hall Network - Nicely Done? and Brandon Hall Researchers Blogging - Implications? where I predict and then roughly say told-you-so that "my guess is that this is going to be a big failure."

This is nothing against the folks at Brandon Hall - in fact, I've had conversations offering ideas of where they might be able to get traction. I would actually like to believe that the community of people interested in the use of technology for learning and performance support would form a vibrant online community, exchanging ideas, making connections, etc.

Unfortunately, as I expressed in Too Many Social Networks, I'm somewhat skeptical that having a lot of networks will really take hold. And, it's worse when you are targeting a particular community that doesn't have a great adoption rate. It takes a lot to get from putting up the network software to getting widespread adoption. Maybe Brandon Hall or a Ning community will take off. Or maybe someone like ASTD will adopt Ning and give it a huge push. Or maybe the eLearningGuild. But it's hard to compete with open models based on stuff like blogging (which has been - by far - my best online social networking tool ever - far beyond discussion groups or anything else).

As caveat to all of this predicting - if you had demoed MySpace to me in the early days - I would have been pessimistic about its chances as well. I mean, c'mon, have you ever seen MySpace? It's got to be the ugliest application ever. And lots of people are putting big bets right now on being able to form communities around particular interest areas. So, maybe Brandon Hall will take off (but I'll stick with my earlier prediction.)

Background Reading - Use of PowerPoint

This month's LCB Big Question is on the Use of PowerPoint. In scanning around a bit for resources on this topic, I've found a few good starting points. I have tagged these in del.icio.us using the tag: lcbPowerPoint. I will continue to do so and you can find a current list at:

http://del.icio.us/tag/lcbpowerpoint

• Research points the finger at PowerPoint

• Reports of the "Death of PowerPoint" greatly exaggerated

• Creating Presentations That Don’t Suck!

• Stop your presentation before it kills again!

• Is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint?

• The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

• PowerPoint Is Evil

• PowerPoint: sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying