Some Hints on Presentations

I love presentations. But only the good ones. That means that my love mostly go unanswered in a world where PowerPoint reigns supreme, and where people simply create poor (or worthless) slides. And never rehearse. Or care about making a point. Or keep their text to a minimum. Or even care if the listeners understand the subject, at all.

I tend to drill my students rather hard on the subject. I am a firm believer in the rule of seven, which basically means that you can keep up a (forced) interest for about seven minutes, meaning that you should somewhat change pace/area or something at least every seven minutes to help you audience be able to understand the subject. Far better, of course, is to be interesting all the time, but that is HARD.

My own personal solution to the major problem with boring presentations is to use mindmaps. It doesn’t help with all the problems, but it does make the presentation seem more focused and easy to follow, and the novelty itself makes the audience note it more.

I’ve just seen an extremely good presentation by Alexi Kapterev that should be mandatory for everyone who ever is going to use powerpoint to take a look at.

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