Presentations 101

The Art of Presentation

As academics presenting is a major part of what we do. Whether it is research ideas in proposals, findings in journals, or theories and concepts in lectures, presenting is our bread and butter. Most of us can recall a dull conference presentation or boring lecture we've been to, and are probably guilty of doing the same ourselves. It isn't hard to highlight reasons behind a bad presentation or to come up with measures to improve things. However, there comes a point where it is difficult to move beyond a limited set of formats and we need some inspiration. Fortunately, help is at hand, and comes in the form of Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. This is a brilliant blog about the art of making visual presentations. Some useful highlights include:

Finding good images
How to present 'naked'
Gates vs Jobs
Good PowerPoint design

There is also an interesting piece based on the insights of Ira Glass, a US radio broadcaster. Here is Ira taking about story telling using anecdotes; a potentially useful way to describe the emergence of new concepts to undergraduates...



Sharing presentations and gaining feedback

As we all know feedback is a useful way to spur improvement. SlideShare is a website designed to allow you to share and again feedback on presentations. There is even an Education & E-Learning group for discussion of what works and what doesn't.

Exemplar

Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet and Director of Gapminder Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden, is becoming a bit of a cult figure amongst visualisation bloggers. In 2006 he made a presentation at the TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference in Monterey, California, on new ways to present statistics about uneven development. This is his talk:



Parts 2 and 3 are available on YouTube. More details of his work can be found at the Gap Minder website.

Further Reading

An essay on PowerPointism by Edward Tufte, and a response from graphpaper.com