Presentation Makeover workshop originated from Designing Effective Presentation (DEP) workshops that I conducted at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) under CDAE@USM. It’s designed with educators and professionals in mind. Read more about the beginnings of DEP workshops.
Presentation is about communicating your ideas and messages to your audience. It’s about sharing your knowledge and experience. Presenting your ideas also is a way to educate and persuade your audience. To persuade your audience to move from Point A to B. Or even Point C.
The way I see it, delivering a presentation is akin to taking your audience for a journey.
In taking your audience for an intellectual journey, it is a common practice nowadays to use presentation tools. Presentation apps, e.g. Powerpoint, Keynote, Canva, as a means to express and illustrate your messages and ideas.
But the common practice of using Powerpoint in teaching and learning, and in research has resulted in many problems, for instance poor attendees, sleep, passive/rote learning and information overload.
Inadvertently, it has also led to the phrase ‘Death by Powerpoint’–a presentation on presentations by Alexei Kapterev.
“You often see very educated people — doctors and lawyers and engineers — trying to make presentations, and they have no clue about how to communicate visually and what happens when you put one image after another. So their lectures become very confused because, from a visual perspective, they’re putting their periods at the front of their sentences, and nobody understands them.”
George Lucas, http://www.edutopia.org/life-screen
As pointed out above, the root causes of many bad presentations are due to the lack of knowledge in visual communication and literacy including design. Sad to say, presentation skills are rarely taught or included in our education system.
Many of us learn via trials and error, at workplace or from youtube–but without really understand the reasonings and impact behind certain design choices–whether they would be effective in delivering your message. Or cause distractions and block communication…
Communication in 21st century presentations are a combination of speech, body language and visuals that illustrate, elucidate and support your message. Planning and designing each component well could lead to an impactful presentation. Where 1+1+1=5, rather than 3.
Thus, the purpose of this workshop is to provide you the foundation in presenting your ideas with impact. It’s time to makeover your presentation!
What will I learn?
Participants for Presentation Makeover workshop will:
- discover types and excellent examples of academic presentations.
- apply simple design choices (text, images, colours) for stunning and impactful presentations.
- discover presentation apps (e.g. Canva, Haiku Deck, Prezi)
- feedback on your presentation slide deck.
- learn new, fresh perspectives in presenting your ideas and work.
Currently a 2-hour session is conducted twice a year for aspiring young academics at USM.
Like Awesome PhD Presentations! this workshop can be customised according to your needs. To gain most benefits i.e. to makeover your presentations, a full day workshop is recommended.