Ep. 122: What makes a good presentation?

The Safety of Work

The discussion provides an in-depth examination of the principles of multimedia, modality, and redundancy, all of which are crucial for optimizing learning and information retention. The episode also offers a wealth of practical strategies for interactive design and meticulous preparation, aimed at enhancing audience engagement and comprehension. These strategies include the use of visual aids, storytelling techniques, and audience participation elements to create a more dynamic and immersive experience. By adopting these methods, presenters can not only convey their message more effectively but also make the learning process more enjoyable and impactful for their audience.

The Paper’s Abstract

Active training techniques are effective because they engage learners in tasks that promote deep thought, discussion, problem-solving, social interaction, and hands-on learning. Passive training is less effective because learners are relegated to merely listening and watching as an instructor does all of the mental, social, and physical work. Bullet-point lectures may be poorly suited for meaningful training because they usually adopt a model of passive learning and they tend to combine spoken words and displayed text in ways that may actually decrease comprehension. PowerPoint can serve as a tool to promote active learning if we eliminate lengthy bullet lists and use instructional images to guide group discussions, problem-solving activities, and hands-on experiences.
Discussion Points:

• Background on the author Mitch Ricketts and the paper
• Active vs. passive learning
• Constructive and interactive learning
• Balancing text and images using multimedia, modality, and redundancy principles
• Use of questions on slides to prompt discussion and interaction
• Importance of managing cognitive load for audience engagement
• Clear, concise content and the value of signaling in presentations
• The significance of preparation and creating separate presentations for different needs
• Strategies for creating effective slides focused on visuals over text
• Moving away from bullet points to use impactful images and labels
• Takeaways - What you SHOULD do on your slides
• The answer to our episode’s question is, the short answer here is the title of the paper- "No more bullet points."

Quotes:

“This is what you might call an applied literature review. It's someone taking the literature and interpreting that literature for a particular purpose.” - Drew

“There's a lot of research that says that a lot of high school and university teachers rely on fairly outdated and disproven theories about these different modes of learning.” - Drew

“If that's the important bit, then blow it up to the entire slide and get rid of the diagram and just show us the important bit.”- Drew

“if you're a learner and you see a giant pair of goggles on a PowerPoint slide with just the word “goggles”, then all you're going to be doing now is just listening to what the presenter is saying. And hopefully they're saying something about goggles.” - David

“Slides aren't there to look interesting and slides aren't there to carry the weight of the content. Think of them as visual support.” - Drew

Resources:

The Paper: No More Bullet Points

The Safety of Work Podcast

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