Speaking in front of large groups can be stressful, nerve-wracking, and filled with problems. What happens if you’re a lackluster public speaker or have a shoddy presentation that the audience won’t understand / appreciate? In this new era of communication and connectivity, it only takes a few seconds for a mediocre presentation to go down in flames.
Down In Flames
That’s just what happened Sunday night at ISTE 2010 in Denver, CO. Jean-François Rischard delivered a presentation titled “Global Problem-Solving and the Critical Role of Educators and Technology for Education.” A lofty subject matter that would surely take some effort to understand and engage.
However, while the presentation was filled with data and a few good points, the presentation back channel was filled with calls for Betty White to deliver next year’s keynote, people thankful they weren’t there, and others saying that a t-shirt was the best part of the keynote.
Technology’s Pervasive Role In Presentations
While we at EduDemic think many people could stand to take a course in Netiquette 101, it’s of course within any Twitter user’s right to express their opinions. However, this proves there is currently a sea change taking place right now as technology quickly becomes an easy-to-use and impossible-to-ignore tool for the audience to be heard.
For example, one of the slides used in Jean-François’ presentation is making the rounds among teachers around the world because it was crammed with information and difficult to read:
While any presenter, teacher, or public speaker knows that slides should be kept concise, it’s important to note that this is simply an ugly slide that shows how dense the subject of the presentation is.
If you ever see this slide in your presentation, it’s time to trim down your subject matter and take another look at the information you really want to convey. With a slide like this, very little information will make it to the audience. They’ll most likely squint to read the text and not even listen to what you have to say.
Notice how many people are on their phones?
However, this was not the reaction of Twitter users sharing this slide with others live from the audience. Many people expressed outrage, walked out of the room, or just started making pretty nasty comments about how it’s time to pick a better keynote for next year’s ISTE.
How This Keynote Helps YOU
We don’t personally know Jean-François but have respect for the subject of his presentation. Instead of spending time bad-mouthing or picking on the presentation, we thought it might be a better use of time to figure out how YOU can use this confusing presentation to your benefit:
- Don’t broadcast live tweets during your presentation if you don’t want to see negative or inappropriate comments. Technology is pervasive and it’s tempting to incorporate live tweets so you can engage the audience and also drum up interest outside of your presentation. If Jean-François gave into this temptation and showed live tweets during his presentation, it would have likely derailed and made the keynote quite a spectacle.
- Develop an engaging slide show by AVOIDING PowerPoint. Try out Prezi, Keynote, or one of the many other tools that blow PowerPoint out of the water. It’s easy to create an engaging and even interactive presentation online without having to succumb to the boring world of PowerPoint.
- Keep it simple, stupid. Like the famous acronym K.I.S.S., it’s important to boil your subject matter into digestible points, takeaways, and helpful facts. After all, the majority of the audience will be paying more attention to Twitter than your talk anyway. You’ll want to avoid having a presentation that inspires someone to create a Mind Map that shows just how disorganized your keynote was (courtesy David Warlick):
Conclusion
Let’s use this keynote as inspiration to create better presentations for the rest of ISTE and for years after. Take the extra time to map out your points, make an engaging presentation, and don’t feel obligated to embrace social media as part of your presentation.
In our experience we have seen pretty negative comments left online about presentations that were good and bad. Take these comments with a grain of salt and keep working on perfecting your presentation. You’ll be glad you did.
Thank you for a wonderful post. While the Sunday evening keynote may have been a negative experience for many there, the constant flow of negative comments on Twitter and Facebook only went to show how childish and unprofessional we can sometimes be online (that would include me at times as well). It has been my experience that when you get a group of educators together in workshops and other PD, we revert to being just like the disruptive kids in our own classrooms. It makes one wonder what the backchannel of our own classrooms would look like. I may try just that this year. How scary would that be?
My presentation at ISTE10 dealt with Twitter and developing one's PLN. After reading the stream of comments Sunday night, I felt compelled to mention that a Personal Learning Network of educators needed to stay professional in nature. (This was not originally in the presentation since I just assumed it would be so!)
Some of the comments about the keynote were negative but not mean, and just stated the tweeter's opinion. The mean ones were the ones that scared me– and also caused me to take a big breath before reviewing the Twitter stream after my presentation in front of a packed house. Constructive criticism has its place, as it always has, but nasty comments should be avoided, IMHO.
"Do on to others as you would have them do onto you." Should we be reflecting more on the content of the presentation than the style. Are we more concerned about flash than content.
Just because we now have the power to comment live and influence others, doesn't give us the right to not be polite. Don't let power corrupt you.
Jim
I like Tim's challenge of opening a back channel to one's own classroom. That would be a scary experience indeed. I was truly fascinated by the Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Buzz, and Plurk posts about this keynote. I was not in attendance, but can tell you that I certainly learned a lot. I feel badly for the speaker since he clearly did not grasp the nature of his audience or the expectations they hold for professional learning. In another conference, his message AND delivery may have been appreciated. I strongly agree with Kathy. We (educators) are, like it or not, always models of behavior. I fear that the ed tech community did not put their best foot forward in their chosen responses to the keynote.
I agree with you Jen. I didn't comment for all to see but I was there and was in shock. Last years keynote was so great that I was wondering what the process is for choosing who will speak at this event. I think that he was well spoken but for a different audience. I think that he could have abbreviated the first 3/4ths of the message in education terms instead of large numbers that mean nothing to me and worked more on examples of how we can fix the problem.
Normally I’m against killing but this arctile slaughtered my ignorance.
You've made some good point but I'd challenge your questioning of using PPT. Prezi, Keynote or any other medium can't save a bad talk. PPT is not the problem. I've seen wonderfully constructed slide decks with PPT and awful presentations using Prezi. It's about understanding the purpose of a slide deck to help tell a story.
Dean, I believe it was David Jakes today on Twitter that made the comment that it isn't about PPT, Prezi, or Keynote. It is about telling a story. I totally agree. A good story can stand on its own without visuals, and a poorly told story can't be helped even with great visuals. This ISTE keynoter definitely had the worst of both: a poorly told story with horrific visuals.
I agree with Dean: it’s the how the content is framed and delivered, not the tool, that matters.
I wrote a post that evening about the opening keynote. In the post, I called myself out for my own behavior… but at the same time, I brought up the point that a keynote speaker at this level (opening speaker at ISTE!) should have done a little more research about his audience. Know to whom you are speaking and ensure your presentation speaks to that audience. I tell my students the same, and they're not paid presenters in front of an international audience.
I agree with Dean- the tool, in this case, PowerPoint was not the problem. The misuse of the tool was.
I was surprised at myself at my own behavior watching the keynote in the Blogger's Cafe and apologize for not being professional. However, I agree with Dean about the keynote speaker's presentation and delivery. It has nothing to do with PowerPoint. I was actually looking forward to learning from the speaker and about the topic. Not only were the slides unreadable, but I had trouble understanding him because he mumbled, talked in a monotone voice, and he kept turning his back to the audience. I even had trouble following the topic the way he presented it.
There have been so many good keynoters at ISTE that I was surprised at his performance and that he either was not prepared well or the selection committee never saw him present. We can learn from good and bad presentations, but what a shame for first time ISTE attendees. Hope they don't give up on attending in the future.
The blogger's cafe was really loud and the mood of the crowd made hearing the keynote even more difficult than the presenter's methods. I found it interesting to speak to other (non-techie) people at the conference who summarized the presentation to me in terms of the content and the sense of urgency that they felt from the speaker, with no mention of the quality of the powerpoint slides. Mr. Rischard is not a techie or an educator so while it is true that it is important for presenters to know their audience, it's also important for the audience to have some understanding of the presenter. It's also important to remember that with over 10,000 participants at ISTE, the audience is not uniform and the people in the blogger's cafe (and those walking out) did not represent the majority of the participants.
I did not attend last Sunday's keynote. I tend to avoid keynote speeches in general because I don't care for them much, so it was an easy decision for me not to go to this one. However, I was made aware that things weren't going well long before the session ended.
I agree with Tim and Kathy's comments regarding the Twitter feeding frenzy that broke out during the speech. Constructive comments, both positive and negative can be helpful. However, many of the comments in question were really mean-spirited. Yes, the speaker needed to do his homework regarding the audience and yes, slides used need to be well designed. However, I fail to see how these provide an excuse for the remarks that were posted on Twitter.
Educators often express concern about allowing students to use microblogs and other Web 2.0 tools in class, stating that they fear students will make inappropriate remarks. How can we hold our children to a higher standard than we hold ourselves? Who models good online etiquette for our students if we don't?
If nothing else, I hope this incident helps us have a little more empathy the next time kids act like, well kids…
I was at the keynote and had mixed feelings. I cringed at the awkwardness of the slides, as most of us did, but in spite of the lack of sense of audience and poor slides, I thought that the content was critically important. I walked out at the end with a sense that our students are the "last best hope", and we are key to their mission.
I spoke with a fellow teacher fellow teacher from our school and we discussed ways that we could productively work with the 20 major issues with our students.
In my mind the point of a keynote is to be thought provoking. This one was for the right and wrong reasons.