Sunday 21 November 2010

Prezi

This month, I was checking out some materials concerned about making a good presentation, mainly for a particular reason, I fail to cut it short, give the essence and the motivation to the ones who were not motivated about it in the first place.

Even in the coziest of presentations , you present just a portion of a huge amount of work, in a very limited time, to a group of people who are already racing towards the coffee break in or their minds, or thinking of ways to hunt that particular someone on his way to his decaf salvation latte, with tiny little biscuits.

So, here you are , with a bunch of heads with different thought balloons, with bars of hunger, blobs of social networks, more blobs of fancied social networks, with a double line research topic, which is extremely interesting of course, not a single doubt about that, but only a subset of this crowd has ever heard about it, and may or may not pay attention, if they are still awake. Here, attention is the Simoleon, one first decides whether to pay attention or not, then acts accordingly.

If you are presenting a 45 minute lecture to a crowd where attention is materialized as a bright red spherical blob levitating in the middle of the lecture hall, and waiting for your first word to burst and flow towards you, creating small waterfalls in between, well, lucky you, you can even read your research paper in the most monotonous tone ever.

But well, that 45 minutes is most likely to be 10 minutes, and it may only be able to give a taste of your research in that time*attention-span, you need your own blue banana to steal attention in most ridiculous ways.

A different presentation may be a professional and concealed way to achieve that. Prezi is a new web service to create presentations, with a twist though. It has a novel graphical style to present, making it easier to fool the crowd, put emphasis on the hierarchy or flow of ideas, and makes this with a new interface, which will indeed make your presentation remembered with all the other Powerpoint presentations presenting ideas with a linear (literally linear, no maths here) flow.

And probably one example will be much more helpful than all these I said:

You may be a student with an .edu or .edu.tr email then don't remember to sign up to the service with the educational discount.
Some useful links:

Conference Presentation Judo Notes:
Some Rules for Making a Presentation - Mihai Budiu
How to Present a Paper - Leslie Lamport

Cheers.

Mali