Technology’s great, but…. (Part 1)

Years ago (I won’t say how many) before the days of PowerPoint and ipads and digital projectors, if one were tasked with making a presentation to a group of people, that automatically came with certain assumptions:

• It would have to be done onsite, in-person in other words…live.
• The presenter would be standing in front of a group of people.
• The presenter would address that audience by talking – in a loud and proud speaking voice coming from the diaphragm or into a microphone that would project their voice thru speakers to the large room.

Fast forward to the 21^st Century. Nowadays, speakers presenting to a group – unless it’s a recorded performance (e.g., YouTube) – are still going to be “in front” of a group of people. But, that can either be done from a remote location and synchronously broadcast “live” to audience location(s) OR…wait for it… The old-fashioned way – as in standing in front of a group of people in the same room, auditorium or whatever.

They still likely talk loud or have to use a microphone and if it’s a “live” event then the audience is either gathered in front of them or logged on by a given time expecting to listen to and watch the presentation.

Herein lies a key point to this blog entry; the show must go on as scheduled or the natives are gonna get restless.

Ever sat in an auditorium and waited as the time the presentation was supposed to be starting came…and went…and the speaker was still getting themselves ready several minutes past start time? Remember how uncomfortable, restless and perhaps even irked that made you feel? You took time out of your life to be there and made sure to be “in your place with your bright shiny face” at the appointed date and time…only to hurry up and have to wait.

Or perhaps you took time out of your life to be logged into your computer on that date and time with the necessary software to receive the live broadcast of the event up and going. And instead you hurried up only to have to wait because of technology difficulties at the presenter’s end. In addition to feeling restless, bored and even irked, remember how easy it was to get distracted and maybe even lured away from the presentation during this unexpected lull?

My point is this; the technology to give a PowerPoint presentation full of visual aids etc is great. The ability to “drive” that presentation and its projection from an iPad you hold while onstage is great. The ability to synchronously simulcast yourself and your presentation to a variety of learners and laptops at remote locations is great. But….

What if everybody’s all ready to listen to you and…your technology doesn’t work? Have you "been there" as a presenter? Did the seconds seem to turn into hours for you as you desperately tried to resurrect your technology and your material?

I was at a seminar once when a young graduate student thought herself "too leading edge" to put her presentation into simple old PowerPoint and before traveling to the conference had found some new whizbang presentation software that was just all full of "whistles and bells" to use instead. And she even spent a few minutes before she fired it up telling us all just how impressed we were gonna be with it...only to have it crash and refuse to power up.

As the seconds drug into seeming hours and she sweat an entire gallon of embarrassment out right in front of us, one of the conference attendees (a consultant for someone in industry) slammed her laptop shut, declared her client was NOT paying her $500 an hour to sit there and watch this girl flop because of uncooperative technology and stormed out.

My advice to you? At least for in-person presentations is always, always, always prepare a good, old-fashioned version of your presentation that doesn’t involve ANY technology. JUST IN CASE. A “manual backup” to your planned presentation, if you want to think of it in 21^st Century digital concepts.

In other words, be careful just how dependent your presentation is going to be on that technology and plan for it to fail you. In other words, have a backup plan that you can immediately speak with and present that doesn’t involve technology at all. That way, should your technology fail you at the wrong time you can still provide your audience with something and on schedule.

My advice? Heed the motto of the Boy Scouts of America and “Be prepared.”

Technology’s great, but…. (Part 2)

I think back to when I took Basic Public Speaking in college. I know it’s hard for Millennials and those even younger to imagine this, but that once was a world without mobile phones – at all – or almost any kind of personal computer (Commodore 64 and the Apple II being leading edge stuff at the time) and certainly no software like Microsoft PowerPoint or Word.

Back then it was just considered common presentation sense that a speaker’s visual aids were there to support his or her presentation and the points being made to the audience. Not, repeat NOT, the other way round.
Somewhere as we sped along the Information Superhighway on our way into the Digital World, this knowledge has been lost.

Case in point; have you ever witnessed a presentation where the speaker and his obligatory PowerPoint presentation just absolutely bombarded you with graphic after graphic after graphic?

Yeah…. Me too. Can you remember any of the main points of that presentation?

Yeah…. Me either. So, at the end of the day, if the audience can't remember the points of the presentation, what did that presenter and all their cutsie image bombardment gain - for you or for them?

Audiences rarely – if ever – had to endure death by imagery before we put the tools to rapidly and, I would purport, excessively build a profuse amount of images into our presentations – Hello; PowerPoint. That technology is great, but like any tool, there’s a right use of it and a wrong use.

The main points I’m trying to make are these:

• Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
• Use graphics only to support, not be your presentation.
• Use your graphics sparingly so they have the impact desired. Too many graphics [or other “whistles and bells,” for that matter] in a presentation and they lose their effect.
• Use only graphics that present the point better than you can explain them. A great example of this would be demonstrating using an item that to do so in person would be prohibitive or unsafe – e.g., using a fire extinguisher in a classroom makes a mess. But a video demonstrating the proper use of the extinguisher to put out a fire does what can’t be done as effectively in the classroom.

The overuse of graphics is not only the signature of someone who doesn’t know any better. Worse, it causes your audience to disengage with your presentation and miss its main points.

Or, to put it "visually:"

Beware the siren's seductive song. It will absolutely destroy your conversion/transition project.

Too often, people think courseware development is so quick, easy (and cheap) - particularly transitioning courseware from classroom to web deployment or creating another similar from an existing (e.g., between models of a product line).

But what a siren's song of disaster such a misconception becomes when actually try to transition the material. 

Case in point; recently I was tasked with transitioning training content between two different models of machinery from the same product family. I'll refer to them from here on as Model A and Model B.

I'd been provided the audio narration text from the existing elearning course for Model A and was trying to convert it to the features, functions and operation of Model B variant of the product line. Similar, yes; but with enough differences to require a thorough screening of the content and a lot of research. As the saying goes, "the devil is in the details."

So over the course of a day, I spent 3 hours researching various technical publications on both models trying to verify whether or not one component of Model A was installed in Model B and if so, exactly how it functioned in B compared to A. I finally had to consult an experienced technician who'd spent about three decades of his life maintaining and repairing the two models. Even so, it took him about 40 minutes chunking through a gozillion pages of the maintenance manuals, wiring diagrams and a whole host of other technical documents just trying to answer that one question one one part of the machine.

That's the kind of time- and budget-eating activity that folks who haven't ever done courseware development either don't know or - even worse - if they won't listen about from those who do know - can really bite 'em in da bahind on a courseware transition project.