I Can See Clearly Now (And I'm Smiling)

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. I Can See Clearly Now (And I'm Smiling)
I've thought a lot about presentations - I've had to - and I'm mostly uncomfortable with the advice in this post. First of all, my presentations are vry rarely to pursuade. I am more often trying to explain or describe. My purpose is to model and demonstrate. I want people to see how I think about these topics, to see how I approach them. This requires clarity, and clarity - rather than, say, colour - is my main goal. I try to put enough text on the slide to be useful - the words help people who have difficulty hearing or who speak a different language. The illustrations are useful, but pointless illustrations - and the slides described here are full of them - merely add deadweight to the download. For visibility, text should be dark on white, and separate from images. Slides should flow - text and images combine to create a message, something viewers can interpret while hearing the presentation. Yes, I've seen poor presentations. But abandoning everything we know about clarity and cognition is not the answer. More...