Designing Great Presentations

1. Designing Great Presentations

2. Overview • Working Backward • The Role of 3 • The structure of a presentation

3. How do you design a presentation? • What is your typical strategy?

4. Curriculum Design • Good course design works backward • What do you want people to learn? • What skills do you want them to have? • Talk design works the same way • What do you want people to know when you are done?

5. Core questions • What do you want people to know? • What do they know now? • How can you bridge the gap between them? • How can you attach new knowledge to existing knowledge? • Are there elements (like skills) that would be hard to transmit in a talk?

6. The Role of 3 • Our cognitive experience is shaped by 3s • That is, small numbers of things… • Who did what to whom? • <X> is similar to <Y> • We do not compare groups of things • Short term memory is also limited • 7 +/- 2 items

7. Try this • List all of the vegetables you can in one minute.

8. How can you do this? • If you just list vegetables, you remember only a few. • Output interference • You can try an associative strategy • Think about a supermarket and walk through it • Visualize a salad. • You are never able to recall everything you know.

9. The Rule of 3 • You remember about 3 things about an experience • Books, lectures, movie plots • You must control what others remember about their experiences with you.

10. Less is More • Organize your presentations around the three things you want people to remember • Decide in advance what those should be • Focus on those points in your presentation • Eliminate extraneous points • Give exercises to reinforce those points • Repeat those points at the end of the presentation

11. Exercise • Narrowing to Three • Really…

12. Structure Your Presentation • Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em • Tell ‘em • Tell ‘em what you told ‘em

13. Memory • Two types of memory • Explicit memory • Primacy and Recency • Depth of processing • Encoding specificity • Implicit memory • Procedural memory • Priming • What are you hoping to influence?

14. Maximizing Explicit Memory • Start and end with a summary • Maximize depth of processing • Get people to do things • Votes • Questions • Exercises • Think about retrieval cues • Where will this information be used? • Can you provide templates?

15. Implicit memory? • What procedures do people need to know? • Structure practice for people • Help them develop skills • Habits • Cannot do complete practice in a talk • Give people assignments • Practice schedules

16. This is crucial • If you do not influence people’s memory, nothing changes • Focus on the influence you want to have • Talk Template

17. Summary • The value of working backward • The Role of 3: Less is more • Influencing explicit and implicit memory