This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Minimalist Presentation
I made a presentation about Stellar to the MIT Libraries on Wednesday. There was a really strong turnout, and I got a lot of questions, a couple of invites to meet with teams in the Libraries, and several Librarians requesting Stellar sites to experiment with. That's just the kind of results I'd hoped for.
I have a sort of canned Stellar presentation that I have used in a lot of places. Maybe it's just because I'd done it so often, but it was starting to really feel boring. There are some graphs (which I like) and there lots of slides with bullets (which seemed dull). So I changed the slides so that with the exception of the agenda and a couple of graphs, they are all titles only. Sometimes I had to break bulleted one slide into two or three, some times I just kept the title and moved the bullets into the notes. Plus i added some new slides just for this audience. Here's the presentation as a Flash movie.
I think the titles-only style worked quite well. It freed me up to walk away from my laptop during a slide. I know what I'm talking about so I just use the slide that's up as topic, and improvised based on the topic. I think this let me pay more attention to the people listening, so I could get a better sense if they were following along, bored, confused, excited, whatever. I also suspect it meant the audience could focus on what I was saying rather than reading the slides.
I give demos when I speak, and I wish had an easier way to switch between my presentation and the demo. My plan for the future is to save the presentation as a flash file and open it in a browser. Then I can keep the presentation in one tab, and the sites I'm demoing in other tabs. Using keyboard shortcuts to move between tabs I'll be able to move fluidly between presentation and demo.