(MSc) Sebinomics

We finally started our preparatory trip through South India and believe me when I say “It is awesome!” Okay, our flight to Bangalore was kind of different from what I am used to. First, we flew from Zurich to Frankfurt in a good aircraft but the nice lady at the check-in counter was not able to give us the boarding passes for our connecting flight Frankfurt-Mumbai. No problem so far we thought. But because our flight had a slight delay in Zurich and then got into Frankfurt with more delay, we were among the last passengers to arrive at the gate and because our tickets were somehow not confirmed from Frankfurt to Mumbai, Sabrina, Michael and I had to sit apart from each other. Not that it was that big of a problem, but it would have been nice to sit together since we are traveling together. So far, so good.

When we boarded the plane I felt catapulted a few decades back in time. Not that I am that old, but the Air India aircraft we took, was among the oldest aircrafts I have ever flown with, if not “The” oldest. My seat already had ugly stains of “whatever-it-was”, and now it has some new ones because the flight attendant spilled some Coke over my nice new GAP pants. Fortunately the pants are of very good quality and it dried up very fast. She was nice and helped me out with some napkins and morally. What was missing was the multimedia system. At this point I have to ad that westerners are kind of spoiled and therefore, we always expect tons of movies and series and music and games to entertain us on flights longer than 6 hours. Well, with Air India you better bring a good book along or just watch a Bollywood movie they play on the screen, if you are able to see it.

In Mumbai, again, we had to hurry to the next plane to Bangalore. This one was actually very comfortable even though the installation was kind of loose in a few corners of the plane. But we were too tired to care about that. Since the plane was practically empty we had a lot of space for ourselves and it was less noisy than in the big and crowded plane we took before. Once arrived in Bangalore, we got our luggage right away and our taxi was already waiting for us. Finally we arrived at the hotel around 4 a.m. and now that I finished writing this blog entry my watch is telling me it is 5.28 a.m. and I should really hit the bed.

This blog entry is about students and how their lecturers condition them with “bad” bullet-point-presentations. What I mean by this is that because many lecturers only use bullet-point-slides, students think that is the “right” way of presenting. Of course, there is no “right” or “wrong” way, but there is a “more” and “less” entertaining way of presenting.

Picture source: http://www.ecom-on.nl/powerpoint.htm

First of all, we might want to understand why many lecturers present with bullet-points and do not bother creating “real” presentations. Some of them are very busy and do simply not have the time to write a script to what they are presenting. They can just hand out the slides before the lecture and students can take notes while Professor John Doe is talking. But what difference does is make if half the class is bored to death and falls asleep? I can think of many examples where good presenters DO NOT USE bullet-points. How many bullet-points have you seen on a slide at a Keynote presentation? Not many, if any at all. My friend Garr Reynolds, a great presenter living, working, and teaching in Japan, showed me a presentation of Marco Montemagno, CEO of Blogoshpere in Italy. His 10-minutes-presentation includes many slides that support his statements and there is simply no need for bullet-points. The content comes out of his mouth and the audience actually listens to what he has to say. If you have the content written on your slides people will read the slide and not listen to you. I try to listen to my professors when I sit in a lecture but I get caught by the attraction of the slide and read its content, which is definitely not good! Why do I go to the lecture then? I could read the book at home (because that is where the content of the lecture comes from anyway) but I rather HEAR the material with someone else’s words. And since I am paying tuition fees, I want my lecturer to “present” this material in a way that prevents me from falling asleep.

Picture source: http://www.ecom-on.nl/powerpoint.htm

I came across a very good Dutch website called eCom-On (www.ecom-on.nl). Their headline “De ‘bullet points’ voorbij!” (English for “The ‘bullet points’ are over”, I think; my Danish is not very good) caught my attention. Another point they raise is not to overload a presentation with graphics but to use the right amount and connect them logically. You should stimulate your listeners to listen to you while showing them visuals. But do not give them “everything” at once. Always leave them wanting more, and “more” always comes out of your mouth.

Here you are one example of an entertaining presentation held by Marco Montemagno:

Let me get back to the point where I was talking about students being conditioned by lecturers who use “bullet-point-presentations”. Let me share this little story with you. There was a group with four members in my class that had to present their findings of a project that was dealing with business communication in different settings. Three members of the group created a slideshow with only bullet-points. Just imagine having a white background with a green Tahoma font and about 5 bullet-points on every slide. No pictures or any other kind of visuals—well, there was a video at the very end, I have to be fair here. Anyway, it was going to be very stiff and boring for their audience. The forth member of the group was not comfortable at all with the slideshow because he is more a “presenter” than a “slideshow-reader”, so he tried to include pictures to make the content more visual, somehow in the vein of Garr Reynolds and Marco Montemagno. His colleagues though—since they only know the “the way of the bullet-point”—found his slides “inappropriate” (because they might have been funny or childish) and wanted to remove the pictures. Another group presented with a slideshow featuring “Sponge Bob” on almost every slide. A great presentation! I do not know if his team members were too conservative or just never had a “real” presentation course. Actually they had a course all based on the art of presenting, but unfortunately the lecturer promoted the use of bullet-points.

At this point I am trying to get “real” presenters to come and hold workshops and/or presentations at our university to overcome this conditioning. I know it is hard to swim against the mainstream but I think it is important to get the message out there and have students and businesspeople holding “real” presentations with good content.

Check out Garr’s blog at presentationzen.com to keep you posted on what is going on in the world of presentations and keep being creative and entertaining to keep your audiences awake.