Yesterday I attended an online presentation from a group of academics of an international university in Europe.
While all of them deserved anyone compliments for the clear investments in preparing and delivering such an information-rich session, the communication effectiveness of their session left something to be desired. It is in fact a rarity nowdays to attend any type of conference, online or off, that doesn't kill the audience by way of long and mostly ineffective PowerPoint-based presentations.
The problem is often with a visibly still primitive culture of visual and public communication that needs much further attention and development especially among our very own best public communicators.
Academics, business marketers and experts in many fields inflict the same frustrating and useless PowerPoint-based presentations to innocent audiences only because too few still are standing up to manifest their disappointment.
Effective public communication is not about projecting your own private notes or the outline of the key presentation points on a large projector. But how many are realizing it?
For one, my professional partner and great supporter Heike Philp, a German new media woman entrepreneur who has an online language learning school, was also attending yesterday's meeting and, from what she wrote in an email a few minutes ago, did feel very much like I did.
Here's what she wrote to the group who had attended yetsterday conference and online presentation:
Heike Philp
"Hi, may I herewith express my gratitude to the Universal team for having put all of this together for the workshop.
What an effort: the survey (which is absolutely fabulous), the research into DCX, the many slides.
My biggest compliments for the hard work that was put into preparing the workshop.
Whilst applauding the wealth of material that was presented, I am still trying to pull the information out of my brain, because it seems to have turned blank from about the middle of Jim's presentation.
Maybe, this is because I am not an academic, maybe this is because I am not familiar with the discussion about DCX in language learning in general. But maybe, (and this is what I would like to confirm with other participants of this very meeting) because of the fact that it is extremely difficult to mentally follow a presentation online, when...
a) it is only a voice you hear, and when the voice seems to read from a script in a fast and monotonous voice...it is death by powerpoint
b) when I (the reader) am not given a chance to read the slide before being interrupted by the presenter
c) the presenter talks as if he is articulating one single very long sentence (without breaks)
d) there are no images
e) there isn't any interaction whatsoever with the live attending audience
f) there is no change of medium, such as for example as showing some information from a specific website, etc.
g) the slides aren't annotated to see where the presenter is going
h) the group text chat is busy because people would really like to talk about what they heard or want to ask questions
i) when the information is not discussed
j) when it takes more than 2 hours non-stop
Whilst voicing my personal experience, which left me physically exhausted and mentally dead at the end of this workshop, I still would like to commend the Universal team.
This having said, may I recite Robin's comment at the end of the meeting, when I mentioned a tip from our "843 Tips for Successful Online Instruction":
Death by PowerPoint is even more deadly in a virtual classroom! - (after a spontaneous 'wow, I am dead')
He then said: Yes, because you can't even see that you killed your participants."
Rgds Heike
let's talk online
Heike Philp
St.-Ulrich-Str. 2
79189 Bad Krozingen
Germany
"If a manager has propensity to dig a hole for himself or herself in a presentation, Powerpoint can be an earthmover on steroids that will bury the presenter totally."
(from: The Lost Art of General Management - chapter 7)
N.B.: I have changed the names of the team involved in the above email message and a few specific references to protect the privacy of those involved.
