.: Presentation Skills - Keeping the Blackberries at Bay
Category:Home / Computers / Hardware
Question: How do you know if an engineer is an extrovert?
Answer: He looks at your shoes when he talks to you! I am allowed to say that, coming from a family of engineers, but it’s exactly to the point of this month’s column on the art of successful presentation design and delivery. At the heart of all successful presentations is a presenter who maintains proper eye-contact with members of the audience at all times.
Microsoft estimates that with over 300 million copies of PowerPoint installed world-wide, something like 3 million presentations are given every day. What they don’t say is that roughly 2.9 million of those are completely ineffective in achieving true knowledge transfer, what presentations are supposed to be about in the first place.
Knowledge transfer occurs, for the most part, when you are able to keep every member of the audience on the same page throughout the entire presentation. Unlike a written report, where the intended audience has the luxury of acquiring the embedded knowledge at his or her own pace, a presentation is actually an event where knowledge transfer is a rather ethereal event; information appears on the screen and is discussed for a fleeting moment in time, and then disappears.
To understand the relationship between an on-screen presentation and a written report (or worse – the presentation printed as a hand-out), think billboard versus magazine ad.
Look me in the eye
To keep the audience together, you first must start with a presentation that allows you to stay engaged with the audience, as opposed to either the screen or your notes. When you lose engagement in business presentations today, you invite audience members to wander, and that’s when the Blackberries blossom.
A key element to successful engagement involves learning proper eye contact, which requires you to hold contact with individuals for anywhere between 3-7 seconds, or until you have completed one thought. At which point, you pause and move to another person and do the same. Most presenters look at one person no more than ½ to 1 second at a time, if that, and then only when they’re not looking up at the ceiling or down at the floor. Or, with extroverted engineers, your shoes.
Modern presentation theory teaches a conversational approach to presenting, because that’s the way to maximize both comfort and trust between you and the audience. By practicing some fairly simple eye contact techniques, you can deliver to a group of 500 without ever feeling more anxiety than you would when discussing your job to friends around a lunch table. Most people find that hard to believe until they’ve received some training, but when you get it down, it’s rather powerful stuff!
People like to talk about themselves, about what they do, and about what they know. Your presentations should be like that. Use the screen to keep yourself in a pre-set direction, use it to list all the points you want to be sure to make, but deliver the presentation itself from the heart. People care somewhat about content, but what moves them to interest is hearing how you feel about it. To get across emotion, you want to be conversational.
Reading is NOT fundamental
Your job as presentation designer, therefore, is to create visuals that further this process rather than hamper it. Your slides need to contain only as much information as is necessary to start the conversation, and allow you to continue it while engaging individuals in the audience with your eyes. You are not there to read slides - the audience could do that quite easily for themselves, thank you. If you’re reading from the screen, you’re not engaging the audience. If your eyes are anywhere but in contact with a listener, the audience is actually dis-engaged.
The other problem with trying to deliver a presentation that contains lengthy streams of prose is that the people who came to hear you speak can read words about 40% faster than you can speak them - 250 words per minute for them vs. 150 wpm for you. It is the equivalent of having a minivan that waits until the last minute to pull out into the road in front of you, and then proceeds to drive 40% slower than the speed limit you were pleasantly exceeding.
When there is too much information on the screen, especially in the form of sentences, not only does the reading process rob the audience of their precious time, it also leads to breaking the essential bond between you and the audience that occurs only with constant eye contact. When you project up TMI, you are forced, by design, to turn your back to the audience as you read from the screen.
As practitioners of the conversational approach know, nothing works more to bind you with the audience than the proper use of eye contact, summed up with this rule:
If eyes aren’t locked then your jaw must be.
With a visual so complex that it forces you to read from the screen, this all-important component to proper presenting is lost, attention erodes, and the only contact your audience seeks is with people at the other end of their wireless devices.
The solution, then, is to restrict the volume of information at each exposure to that which can be absorbed by both you and the audience in just a few seconds - 10 at most. The proper procedure for achieving transfer of information from the screen to the audience involves a fairly simple 3-step process, but that deserves an article all to itself.
Article keywords: public speaking, presentation, presentation skills, presentation design
Article Source: http://www.articles32.com
J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, a national consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos. For free tutorials in print and video, go now to: http://www.publicspeakingskills.com.
.: New Hardware Articles
1). Computer Recycling: What You Need To Know
Overall disposing of computers correctly by recycling parts and components could result in a better cleaner less toxic environment. Cleaner environment means less global warming, habitat destruction and deforestation. Also reducing the amount of raw materials needed in order to produce these machines.
2). How To Keep A Cleaner, Longer Running Computer
One of the more neglected aspects of owning a PC is following some simple preventative maintenance procedures. Preventative maintenance procedures are commonly recommended for most all mechanical and technological gadgets.
3). What is the WEEE Directive?
The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) 2006 directive concerns the responsible disposal of electrical and computer equipment by companies and individuals, and is now enshrined in European Law.
4). Edgeline Printer Technology Will Change Office Printing Forever
Imagine print speeds as fast as 70 pages per minute. Imagine color output as good as the best inkjet technology. Now combine that with the best operating costs available today. Sound too futuristic to be possible? Find out why this technology could be in your office by mid-year.
5). Ink Cartridges: How to Buy the Best Value Printer For Them
Printers, ink cartridges and other computer peripheral hardware are any everyday part of life at home and work today
6). HP Ink Cartridge Refill Kits Are Smart Buys
For those who need HP ink cartridge refill kits, the news is good. There are many companies that make these tools.
7). Find The Best Computer Printer Ink Price Ranges
However you can not find much difference in computer printer ink price ranges in the stores. Even you may not found the exact price to the same products in different stores. That is why the ultimate solution to get the exact price may in some cases you will get discount price.
.: Top Hardware Articles
1). Acer Aspire 3004WLCi - A Quick Review
I recently found myself in need of a new laptop. With a tight budget and moderate needs, I knew it wasn't going to be easy to find a product that would do what I wanted and still be in my price range.
As a Network Technician and a Web Designer, I needed a machine that would have enough storage to store all my software, projects for my clients, and still be able to handle an occasional temporary operating system backup from a client's machine.
2). IBM Computer Diagnostics: Error and Beep Codes
The following table includes some of the more common printed error codes that might be displayed when your vintage or non vintage IBM computer is performing the power-on self test (POST).
- record error codes that are displayed. If you need to call for help it will be best to be able to provide the error codes.
- if you get multiple error codes , always work to solve problems in the order in which the error codes are displayed.
3). Find your laptop drivers easily!
Many people, especially beginners, struggle in finding drivers for their laptops. In this article, I will illustrate two ways to help you find your laptop drivers quickly, and easily.
The first method we will consider is to visit a company's website, and attempt to find a 'Drivers' or 'downloads' link. If a similar link is not immediately apparent, look for a search box.
4). Canon Pixma inside out – the iP4200 Photo Printer
So you might have already heard about the new Canon Pixma iP4200 that’s doing the rounds in the computer hardware industry nowadays. Everybody is reviewing it, including us.
Canon has been keeping mum over the longest-lasting-photo-prints debate for sometime now. Possible explanations include the newly released Pixma iP4200, with built-in duplex printing; individual cartridges; two paper-input trays; easy operation; inexpensive; great-looking photos; and 100-year print life.
5). How To Properly Install A New Motherboard
The motherboard is the most expensive computer component so be sure to treat and handle it with great care.There are a few things you should do to ensure no motherboard damage occur as you prepare for the installation.
Be sure you have a clean,well lit,and level work place.Relax your mind and make this task both fun and educational.You will need such tools as a phillips screwdriver,maybe some needle nose pliers and the manual that came with the board.
6). Why do we defrag the Hard Disk?
What is Defragging?
Defragging is process done to a hard disk in order to improve performance and recover some lost disk space. Defragging is an essential part of a PC's upkeep as it keeps all the data on your hard disk in an easily readable order. If a hard disk is left without defragging, then over time the disk will begin to lose performance and also slowly reduce the available capacity to data.
7). USB Memory - Tips on Booting Your USB Device
The arrival of this miniature hard disk was a great timing just as computing is in need for memory drives that can solve the problem of the aging floppy disk.