Viv McWaters and I run a training program we call ‘Insanely Great Slideshow Presentations‘. It was fun to design and we have had great feedback from participants – the best feedback is when you see people using the new ‘zen’ approach to slide design and story in their next presentation! I have been playing with an online platform known as Prezi. In the early days it was clunky and I stopped using it for some reason. Recently they have ramped up it’s design and ease-of-use and I’m back using it. Time to combine this tool into our training package Viv …

Here’s a nice post by Viv McWaters that sums up my experience as a facilitator of group workshops where Powerpoint presentations are delivered. I’ll add to Viv’s commentary and say … I agree that bullet points on slides should be banned 🙂 and … In my recent experience, the best presentations happen when the technology fails and presenters have to go back to their ‘story’ and forget the script that emerges from text-dense slides. They often gravitate to the nearest whiteboard and start to draw pictures to help explain their key points. Why don’t their slides contain the same pictures? …

This 4 minute TED talk by Alisia Miller shines another light on the power of Web 2.0 (incl. Blogs and social networks). If you want to know what is really happening in the world … go beyond the industrialized media systems. This may also be true for education and learning. Alisia also communicates her ‘core message’ via the Visual pathway … far more powerful than words and bullet points. Geoff