Quick Practical, Tactical Tips for Presentations In the past I’ve given some tips for handling meetings effectively, covering topics like: - How not to let your meeting go down a rat hole; - Dealing with the elephant in the room; - Dealing with skeletons in your closet; - How to make meetings discussions, not “pitches” - A tale of two pitches (I eventually invested in the first company that pitched) Today’s post is a subtle one about positioning yourself in a presentation. This might be a VC meeting but also might just be a sales or biz dev meeting. It’s any meeting where you are in a small room and are being called on to present on some form of overhead slides 1. If you look at Diagram A above you’ll see that the presenters are sitting at the opposite end of the table from where the screen is. If you look at Diagram B you’ll see that the people you’re presenting to can look you in the eyes and glance up at the screen. 2. I’ve lately been attending meetings with our shareholders (called LPs or limited partners). 3. 4. 5. 6.
5 Tips to Make Your House Appear Cleaner Than It Is | Apartment Therapy San Francisco So you get a text message that tells you company is dropping by and they're only 10 blocks away. Don't panic. Take a deep breath, now panic and check out these 5 tips for making your house appear clean in a flash. That's right, I said appear. Who has time to really clean in 10 blocks? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Do you have a quick clean-up tip that helps you out when company calls? Educational Technology Network FlowingData | Data Visualization, Infographics, and Statistics Swiss Group Wants to Banish PowerPoint While most people might not love using Microsoft's PowerPoint to create presentations, at least one person is taking his distaste for the software to a global level. Matthias Poehm, a former software engineer-turned-public speaking trainer has started -- yes -- the Anti-PowerPoint Party (APPP) earlier this month. Headquartered in Bonstetten, Switzerland, the APPP calls itself an "international movement" that intends to "decrease the number of boring presentations worldwide." The goal is to make it so that people who don't want to use PowerPoint "will not have to justify themselves in the future," it says. Right. While an APPP representative didn't immediately return an email seeking comment, the statistics above seem to originate from Poehm's book, "The PowerPoint Fallacy." If this doesn't seem wacky enough, the group says it also wants to participate in the Swiss national elections in October and become the country's fourth-largest political party. Keep it short. Don't be long-winded.
How to Sound Like You Know What You're Talking About (Even When You Don't) Your response says it all-you're reinforcing exactly what I said, that I'm denigrated because I expect what any critical thinker expects: honesty about the facts, theories and accuracy of prediction capability. ANY research has limits, and discussing those limits is part of what makes research useful. Denying the limitations of the research is, well, DENIALISM. No where did I "deny" anything, I stated that I get labelled a "denier" because I ask for information so I can make informed judgements of my own, rather than follow either party line. I'm a fairly smart person, I can understand studies and research data. Right now I struggle to get to the data through the noise-the noise on both sides. I want to know what the theories say, and what the limits are, and not be preached to that "the answer is this". It's the religious fervor (that both sides use) that I take issue with - I can't ask questions without being labelled a non-believer - I must simply "accept" what I'm being told.
The Impact of Video in Education Infographic Educational Technology Infographics The Impact of Video in Education Infographic presents how to strategically adopt video technologies into teaching and learning, and how to best guide students in the development of 21st century skills to prepare them for their role as global citizens. It is a perfect moment for educators everywhere to re-assess their use of video and to make the key decisions about how best to incorporate it into their students’ learning experience. The Impact of Video In Education You may also find valuable the following resources: Via: blogs.cisco.com Embed This Education Infographic on your Site or Blog! Why megatrends matter Megatrends are the great forces in societal development that will very likely affect the future in all areas the next 10-15 years. Many companies and organizations use megatrends in their strategic work. Below, you can gain an overview over the 10 most important megatrends as we head toward 2020. Megatrends are great forces in societal development that will affect all areas - state, market and civil society - for many years to come. In other words, megatrends are our knowledge about the probable future. Even though megatrends say something about what we know about the future, it is not certain how society, companies or any of us will react to these forces. Futures researchers always work with three types of futures: the predictable, the possible, and the preferred. Megatrends say something about the probable future, but there are other possible futures. Megatrends are the probable future - or express what we know with great confidence about the future. #1 Ageing #2 Globalization
How to create a visualization Over the last few years I’ve created a few popular visualizations, a lot of duds, and I’ve learned a few lessons along the way. For my latest analysis of where Facebook users go on vacation, I decided to document the steps I follow to build my visualizations . It’s a very rough guide, these are just stages I’ve learned to follow by trial and error, but following these guidelines is a good way to start if you’re looking to create your first visualization. Play with your data I was lucky enough to spend a few hours with Andreas Weigend recently, head of the Stanford Social Data lab. He has nine rules of data, and the first is “Start with the problem, not the data.” In my case, we have a Cassandra cluster with information on more than 350 million photos shared on Facebook. Click to enlarge. I was chatting with my colleague Chris Raynor about this, and he asked me if we could tell where all the visitors to those places were coming from. Pick a question Sketch out your presentation Related:
How to Do Laundry on a Road Trip Like John Steinbeck Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Jeff More. You’re packing for a road trip and you’re down to deciding how much clothing to bring. You could have a fresh change of clothes every day, but that adds up to a lot of space quickly, especially if you have multiple companions. You really would prefer to travel light, but that means either finding a laundromat and spending a stack of quarters and a few hours in town, or hand washing your clothes at camp when you could be kicking back and enjoying a foil meal instead. Or you could just suck it up, not change, and reek a little. Here’s a tip I got from Travels with Charley (sadly missing from the Art of Manliness’ 100 best reads, but no one’s perfect), John Steinbeck’s 1962 travelogue documenting his road trip circumnavigating the Lower 48 with his French poodle, Charley, and how the American landscape had changed over his lifetime. What You’ll Need: Here’s how it works. In the Morning At Lunch At Camp Congratulations, you smell fresh!
Do Video Lessons Reinforce Learning, or Just Reinforce Pre-existing Incorrect Understanding? Have you ever shown a video to a classroom of students and heard one or more of them say, “I already know this stuff”? While the video plays, these students are likely to daydream, surf their phones, doodle, or otherwise fail to pay attention and learn. Worse yet, if they have a certain perception of how something works and this is corrected in the video, not only are they not too likely to pick up on it, but they may actually come away from the experience thinking their perception was validated. The same thing can happen when they watch videos on their own as part of assigned work outside of class. While preparing the first “Premium Members’ Video Round Up” (more on that below), one of the videos I selected offered powerful insights into who students learn, or don’t really learn, when watching some videos. “It is a common view that “if only someone could break this down and explain it clearly enough, more students would understand.” About Kelly Walsh Print This Post
Do's and Dont's of Making Awesome Diagrams for Slides Yeah. I do loads of slide decks each year for several companies and there are two types of decks I do a lot. One is the presentation. The trouble is when I run into people who I can't convince there should be a difference. A coworker refers to them as textbombs, or in particularly egregious cases, text WMDs. Anybody help me? They are loose terms, so I'm sure they're called other things as well. An infodeck is a slide deck that is not meant to be presented to an audience.