Monday, November 12, 2012

Presentation Zen: Pecha Kucha and the art of liberating constraints

In reading the Presentaion Zen blog on Pecha Kucha, I have learned many things.  Pecha Kucha was invinted in Japan in 2003 in Tokyo by two Japanese architects.  A Pecha Kucha is a powerpoint presentation that is twenty slides long, and you must spend twenty seconds talking about each slide, therefore your presentation will last six minutes and forty seconds.  Pecha Kucha was developed to keep presentations short and sweet, and to the point, and so more could be seen.  There are Pecha Kucha nights in cities all over the world.  Pecha Kucha is a good training exercise for people to practice, because of the limits that it has.  The Pecha Kucha method is more more exciting for someone to pay attention to than a 50+ page slideshow that a professor has ready for the class.  Pecha Kucha only lasts for six minutes and forty seconds and is able to offer a stimulating discussion, and a powerpoint takes up an entire classroom session, leaving no time to ask question at all.

Friday, November 9, 2012

Live Blog From Wednesday 11-7-12

There are many do's and don'ts of using Powerpoint Presentations.  Make sure to spell check your work, if a word has a red line under it, go back and check it again.  Do not over use bullets, only mark important information, or "key points" with bullets, every single word should not have a bullet beside it.  Make sure that you don't pick clashing colors on your slides, for example two different tones of the color yellow, this will be very difficult for people to see.  Only put one key point of information on each slide, you don't want to put too much information on a slide and bombard a person with information.
Only give about three or four reasons supporting your arguement, after that people will lose interest in what you are saying.  Make sure that you know what you are talking about, and be interested in what you are going to talk about, no one is going to be interested in listening to you if you aren't having a good time talking about your subject.  Lastly, don't use the Powerpoint as a teleprompter, and read it word for word, the people you are presenting to can read the slides faster than you can speak, and will get bored.  You should have other notes to complement the slides you are using.

Original and Recreated SlideShare Slides

Original Slide from SlideShare



Recreated Slide