What Makes a Presentation Great? Deconstructing TED Talks Since he gave the presentation back in 2009, Simon Sinek’s TED Talk on inspiring action has racked up more than 12 million views. His presentation is the most popular TED Talk on business or marketing by a long shot. In fact, it is the second-most viewed TED Talk ever, surpassed only by Ken Robinson’s 2006 education-focused address on how schools kill creativity. Some speeches feel like magic. Using Sinek’s wildly popular talk, let’s walk through these components. First, though, let's take a look at the TED Talk in question: Structure He opens by asking the audience to question. Note that I didn’t say he opens by asking a question, because it’s not about the question itself -- it’s about getting the audience in the mindset of questioning. He opens with a series of questions designed to open the audience up to the idea they are about to hear. "How do you explain when things don't go as we assume?" Tip #1: Get your listeners in the mindset. He introduces a clear and simple inflection point.
PowerPoint Bulleted List Theorem Most of us associate PowerPoint with lectures in large darked halls with many slides of bulleted lists accompanied by a droning voice. So what is wrong with the bulleted lists in PowerPoint? I was preparing to conduct a workshop on PowerPoint and Education and found some theoretical basis for why we should not use bulleted lists when presenting. As you see, I do use them freely in documents. [This is presented as a theorem just to make it interesting. It is just my very simplistic interpretation of work done by many people and better presented elsewhere - see references at bottom. Compare this: To This: Statement: Using Bulleted lists while narrating during presentations is detrimental to students' learning. Axioms: Argument: Information presented in a manner that overloads the processing power of the Working Memory makes learning difficult. Bulleted lists which are multiple concepts presented as text are processed by both the visual and verbal channels. The audience struggles Conclusion:
How to Give a Killer Presentation A little more than a year ago, on a trip to Nairobi, Kenya, some colleagues and I met a 12-year-old Masai boy named Richard Turere, who told us a fascinating story. His family raises livestock on the edge of a vast national park, and one of the biggest challenges is protecting the animals from lions—especially at night. Richard had noticed that placing lamps in a field didn’t deter lion attacks, but when he walked the field with a torch, the lions stayed away. From a young age, he’d been interested in electronics, teaching himself by, for example, taking apart his parents’ radio. The story was inspiring and worthy of the broader audience that our TED conference could offer, but on the surface, Richard seemed an unlikely candidate to give a TED Talk. But Richard’s story was so compelling that we invited him to speak. On the basis of this experience, I’m convinced that giving a good talk is highly coachable. Frame Your Story
Digital professionalism... if only it were that easy Image: Doctor reading articles by rosefirerising The longer I am online and the more I become immersed in being online the more complex this existence seems. I want to talk about some principles for "Digital Professionalism" which have been put forward by Rachel Ellaway in the journal Medical Teacher last year. The journal is paywalled so I am going to give the principles here. Principle #1: establish and sustain an on online professional presence that befits your responsibilities while representing your interests. Principle #2: use privacy controls to manage more personal aspects of your online profile and do not make anything public that you would not be comfortable defending as professionally appropriate in a court of law. Principle #3: think carefully and critically about how what you say or do will be perceived by others and act with appropriate restraint in online communications. Principle #7: an online community is still a community and you are still a professional within it.
What makes for an effective presentation? The age-old question. Well, it's not the knowledge level of the presenter. We've all been bored to tears by subject matter experts who could probably be cited for breaches of the Geneva Conventions, so awful are their presentations. It's not shiny slides. It's not a fluent, personable presenter who tells a great story – too many times this deteriorates into a triumph of style over substance and you walk away having enjoyed the honeyed words, but feeling vaguely dissatisfied because there wasn't really any point to the presentation. So what is ingredient X? If any of the four C's are out of kilter, your presentation won't achieve what you want, or need, it to achieve: "I see where you're going with this Robo. And so on. The end-all, be-all of this is that presentations that are going to be effective require hard work. The only organisations where I have cracked this are when we have been called in at the senior-most level and have had our ideas embraced by the CEO. Thoughts?
Chatting on Twitter about Medical Education Image: Coversations at Vermillion by JeanineAnderson A few years ago when I started blogging and tweeting my aim was to try and connect with other people interested in medical education. It was hard to find people, and still the bulk of those involved in medical education- educators, students and doctors are not active in social media. But there are enough of us here to make it reasonable to consider sketching out some spaces to interact and find each other. There has also been talk over the last year or so about having a #meded chat. In the US, Ryan Madanick is hosting the first #meded chat at 9pm EST or 1am UK time. Personally, I think that tweetchats have quite a few limitations. If you want to join in the discussion just add #meded to your tweets between 9 and 10 pm tonight. Please feel free to leave any comments here, or just join in!
BG 218: Liberating the Soul of Organization | Buddhist Geeks Podcast: Download Episode Description: We’re joined this week by Brian Robertson, founder of HolacracyOne, a company whose aim is to liberate the soul of organization. We also look at the parallels between the practice of Holacracy and the practice of meditation. This is part 1 of a two-part series. Episode Links: Transcript: Vincent: Hello, Buddhist Geeks. Brian: Thanks Vince for having me. Vincent: Yeah and so before we jump into what it means to liberate the soul of an organization, because that’s such a provocative purpose to have, obviously on Buddhist Geeks a lot of what we tend to focus on are things around practice or around Buddhist culture. Brian: Yeah absolutely. For me, it was through running organizations and searching for better ways of even understanding what this is, and who am I in this organization. And it was about that time in my life that I started finding some of the wisdom that’s out there, that’s been all around me, and I just missed all my life. Vincent: Cool.
From @HealthCulture 'the misuse of health statistics by politicians' - this is in US but happens everywhere:( [This post contains links to the New York Times. If you position your mouse over a link, you can view the destination URL at the bottom of your browser.] When former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2007, he used to give a campaign speech that referred to prostate cancer and health care. His sound bites were turned into a radio commercial and included the following: I had prostate cancer five, six years ago. What’s wrong with this picture? The numbers themselves – the 82 and 44 percent — were incorrect. Where did the lowly 44% for England come from? Comparing apples to oranges More importantly, comparing five-year survival rates for the US and England is fundamentally misleading. Another way to understand this is to consider a group of men who die of prostate cancer at age 70. To say that survival rates are better in the US than in England means nothing if screening policies are significantly different in the two countries. Resources:
ytlearn [licensed for non-commercial use only] / ytlearn ytlearn is a Wiki where educators are invited to share their own learning from YouTube and also to indicate whether or not YouTube is accessible to educators in their place of work and to see if they are aware of the reasons why YouTube is blocked. Follow the # on Twitter #ytlearn - short for YouTube learn - and if discussing this topic on twitter please use this # in your tweet. Please add as many examples as you wish. Learning does not have to relate to professional learning This is clearly not the first attempt at raising this issue. This is a real workspace! Get Great Ideas! Learn what makes a good collaboration project and see how other PBworks customers are using their workspaces. Need Help? The PBworks Manual can help show you how to edit, add videos and invite users.The best way to get your support questions answered is to click the help link at the top of this page.
Why can’t you help me with my maths, Dad? | Sine of the Times: Dividing the Universe by Zero OK, before everyone starts screaming about sexism, I used to go to my father for help with my maths homework, and this post is a reflection on the problem (grand)parents of my generation and/or younger are facing, or going to face, as the use of digital technology increases. Never mind about Gen-X or Gen-Y, the current cohort of students is definitely going to (have to) be e-Gen. I have been ‘pushed’ towards this post because a number of different articles, talks and reflections have crystallized into a form which I feel satisfactorily explains or, at least, exemplifies what I think has always been a fundamental approach towards my own methodology in teaching mathematics, or which have helped me to clarify my own thoughts on it. It took another change in technology to bring it to the fore (or should that be four!). Be prepared for a bit of a ramble, but I feel I have to write this down because… I just do that’s why! So, the articles… Next, the talks… The Wolfram brothers. Like this:
GPs and private businesses A very short letter from a Tory MP in response to a detailed and serious letter from a constituent raising concerns about the government’s proposed NHS reforms: Thank you.Are GPs private contractors?Should they be nationalised and made salaried state employees?Sir Peter Bottomley MP To answer a constituent’s seriously considered letter of concern with a rhetorical question is bad enough, two rhetorical questions borders on contempt. Nevertheless the first ‘question’ pops up quite frequently, though usually as a statement, “GPs are private providers! The first ‘question’. A GP working in private practice sees private (non NHS) patients. GPs services are increasingly being run on APMS (Alternative Provider of Medical Services) contracts. There have been two main consequences of opening up general practice via APMS. The first was the introduction of ‘alternative providers’. Traditional general practice is a cottage industry. Reasons to support ‘alternative providers’. Updates Like this:
Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education The exploitation of contingent labor, a shrinking middle class, administrative elephantiasis: the turmoil in academia is a microcosm of American society as a whole. A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to even meet with her. Unmaking the Public University The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. The American Faculty The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers. The Marketplace of Ideas Reform and Resistance in the American University. Wannabe U Inside the Corporate University. Higher Education? Crisis on Campus A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities. No University Is an Island Saving Academic Freedom. Saving State U Why We Must Fix Public Higher Education. About the Author William Deresiewicz Also by the Author