As I write these words, 2009 about to become 2010. And I’m looking back on one particular aspect of my life which I enjoyed very much, which I had to put on hiatus during this last year.

A Classic Zeiss Planetarium Star Projector

For quite a few years I’ve been a part-time educator/presenter at the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium, in Concord, New Hampshire. The planetarium is the state of New Hampshire’s official memorial to the first teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe. Of course, Christa was one of the astronauts killed in the Challenger disaster. After much discussion about how to officially remember her, it was decided that a planetarium was the best possible thing — a living institution of teaching and learning.

I have to say, I love doing planetarium shows — it’s something that I have a great time doing. One of the really cool things about the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium is a commitment to doing live shows. While some of the shows on each day’s schedule are pre-recorded (which allows for something much more spectacular,) many shows are at least partially live, and there’s at least one show which is entirely live — Tonight’s Sky. For most presenters, me included, Tonight’s Sky was the most fun show to do. We had pretty much free reign of topics so long as it was something that generally fit under the title of Tonight’s Sky. When I did the show, before we started I would always ask the audience if there was anything that they were hoping to see, or learn about in the show. Often I would get a list of very interesting questions, and would build the show around them — completely customizing it to a particular audience in the theater. To me, this was great fun to do.

Not surprisingly, as someone who loves stories, I would often balance technically heavy content with mythology and stories from all over the world. I would try to reference mythology from at least three continents in every show, and I almost always was able to do that. Sometimes, particularly with younger audiences, I would devote five or more minutes to telling a full story based around a constellation or another object in the sky. I even carried a bamboo flute with me in the theater, I would pick up the flute and played for a few phrases to set the story apart from the scientific content and the rest of the show.

While working at the Planetarium, I saw a lot of planetarium shows, each one many times. This allowed me to study them in depth. Often, when we think about seeing a planetarium show, we think about it in visual terms — the spectacle of the projected sky, amazing and unexplainable special-effects, and feeling like we’re looking into or even traveling through the depths of space. To me though, the thing that made the most successful shows so successful was not a matter of visual production quality, it was a matter of storytelling. The best shows took their topic and wove it into a story — occasionally a literal story where we’re following characters, but more often presenting information in the form of a story — a powerful opening that gets our attention, and inciting event that draws us forward, a course of action that builds to a climax, and a resolution with reflection on the journey.

Unfortunately, the Planetarium is over an hour away from just about everything else I do, and it just became too difficult for me to schedule with any regularity. So I finally had to admit that at least for the time being I had to let it go. I’m sad about that, and I’m sure I’ll be back in one form or another to working under the dome. In fact, I’m about to embark on a different kind of astronomical journey shortly. I’m going to be designing massive, full stage projections for the Portsmouth Symphony Orchestras presentation of The Planets in June. I’ll be talking more about that project here, as I get more involved in doing it.

Well, it’s now 2010. Time for bed.

What is it that makes great art great? I’ve often seen people try to answer this question in a technical way, and have even been guilty of doing that myself on occasion; but I really think that it’s not about anything technical. Great art speaks to you in an intangible way that reaches to your very core. It may bring a deep sense of peace, or a sense of discomfort in the unsettled — but it moves you in a way that’s profoundly real. So as someone who creates art, the question becomes how do you do that?

Great art is in the eye and heart of the audience. (photo by Peasap)

There’re a number of things that have been helpful to me in my work, I’ve found that either technical mastery or technical inexperience tend to be good starting points — one end of the spectrum the technique is so natural that it’s not in the way, at the other end of the spectrum there is no sense of technique or how it should be to get in the way. I’m reminded of Prof. Peter Rothbart who I studied electroacoustic music with at Ithaca College. In one of the first intro classes he suggested that those of us who were not really accomplished keyboard players not try to play the synthesizer like a piano but rather treat the keyboard like a row of buttons so that our creativity was not stifled by lack of technical ability.

I’ve also found that for me it’s important to “empty the cup,” that is to stay to start from a position of no expectation about what the outcome will be. When I begin a new design, I do my very best to set aside any preconceived notions and simply read the script and/or score and see what it has to say. Only then, am I ready to talk to the director, with my initial impressions firmly in my mind to ground me.

But I still don’t think that these are the things that make for great art, I believe they can certainly help to facilitate it, but there’s something else. Whenever I do what I later looked back on as some of my best work, I home to a critical point where I am getting out of my way, and letting the work “do,” rather than me doing the work. I really don’t know how else to explain this, in a way it’s very strange, and in a way it’s very natural. It really is about letting go and letting the music, or the imagery, or the stage picture, or the talk comes through me. When I’m able to do that, that’s where the real magic is.

Are you terrified when you need to present?  Are you worried about whether you’re going to “get through?”

Think about it, whenever someone gets up to give a presentation presumably they are looking to communicate something. Or if not, someone else is looking for them to communicate something.  I believe that by thinking about that communication as a dialogue of story, we, as presenters have much greater ability to move our audiences. It is only through moving our audiences emotionally that we can communicate intellectually in a way that is memorable and meaningful.

Let me say that again, it is only through moving our audiences emotionally that we can communicate in a way that is memorable and meaningful. This is a key tenant of my work, where ever it’s been. Whether designing for theater, producing special events, performing on stage, speaking to an audience, creating content for the web or even just having a meaningful conversation, when I think back to the times I’ve been at my best is always about creating an emotional connection.

One of the most powerful ways I know to create a connection is through storytelling. I’d like to offer you two incredible examples of storytelling in settings where you might not think about it that way. I’d like you to watch both of these pieces of video in their entirety, are both worth it, filled with content that you will find useful and ideas that you will find inspiring. I’m not going to provide any introduction to the videos because I want you to watch them with an open mind, and without me imposing a context. As you watch, and enjoy these videos are just a little bit about what these presenters are doing that makes them so engaging.

Did you watch both videos? If you didn’t please go back and spend the time. I promise that they’re both worth it,  and I’ll still be here when you’re done.

So why are these presenters so compelling? I think that the first key issue, which Gary Vaynerchuk speaks so eloquently about, is passion. I think that it would be rather difficult to find more passionate people than Gary Vaynerchuk and Benjamin Zander.   The passion alone is not enough for effective communication, they are each doing more than that. They are both telling stories. When I say they’re telling stories, I’m not referring to the small stories that they tell about experiences as a part of the talk. Each of these presentations is a story in its entirety.

They both open with strong beginnings. The beginning serves to hook us, to get our attention.  In Gary’s talk he first addresses the people in his audience “just because you’re here, I know that you are going to kill it, and that’s what I want to talk about.” In one statement he begins to create a powerful rapport. Then he awakens our curiosity by telling us that what he wants to talk about is “PP.” What the heck does that mean? By causing us to ask that question in our own minds, we are powerfully drawn in.

Ben starts his talk with a humorous story that has a message. All three of these points are important. People like stories, starting with the story invites us to open up. We also love to laugh, and with this use of humor he sets a light tone for the talk even know what he’s going to talk about is quite significant. But notice, he’s not starting with a joke or a funny, but insignificant story. He’s starting with a story that has a message, that’s inviting us to be open to a new possibility and that’s setting the stage for where he’s going to take us. Once again, by the end of the first few seconds he’s caught our attention.

You see, both of these presenters are starting a powerful storytelling technique of a hook.  Giving us a reason to care, and drawing us in. I could continue to analyze these presentations and how they follow the age-old storytelling forms, I’m not going to do that. I’ve already asked enough of your time, and I want to leave you with this to think about:  think about how both of them reached out and connected emotionally first, and how powerful that is!

That, and one more thing.   Notice, that neither one of them use any PowerPoint slides.

Note: This post was inspired when I watched the Gary Vaynerchuk video as a part of Adam Baker’s excellent blog post How NOT To Suck At Blogging

While I was at the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference yesterday, I had a chance to see a presentation given by a wonderful teacher. John Fladd is an eighth-grade social studies teacher at the Deerfield Community School, in Deerfield, NH.   He gave a talk called “Inspiring PowerPoints – NOT an Oxymoron,”  during which he showed us a large variety of PowerPoint presentations which he uses with his students. These presentations all use sound, video  and many many wonderful images to bring to life the topics that he teaches, and to do it with a theatrical flair and a great sense of humor.

On his blog, Teacher Toys, John has created a page with quite a number of links and resources that he uses in creating presentations.   If you use PowerPoint with any regularity, take a look at his page, I suspect that you’ll find quite a number of useful things. It’s at http://teachertoys.weebly.com/nelms.html.

John opened his presentation with a YouTube video by comedian Don McMillan which does an amazingly good, and amazingly funny job of demonstrating the problems of so many PowerPoint presentations. Watch it now, just make sure you’re not drinking anything you could spit out all over your keyboard when you break out laughing.

When I googled to find Don’s website, I discovered that he has a brand-new version of his Life After Death By PowerPoint video which you can watch on his site. I actually think I like the original version a little bit better, but there is some great new bits in the new version. Check it out at http://www.technicallyfunny.com/blog/blogdon.htm

I just got back from making two presentations at the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference in Nashua, NH. I really enjoyed presenting both longer and shorter versions of the talk I call “Once Upon a Supercomputer — Technology Assisted Storytelling.” This is a talk I first developed quite a few years ago for the Faculty  Instructional Technology Summer Institute at the University of New Hampshire, and have given to a variety of other audiences since.  I really enjoyed meeting so many inspired educators, and sharing with them some of my ideas.  Specifically, I believe that we can learn from thousands of years of human experience, transmitting knowledge through story and apply that to the modern classroom. Imagine for a moment drawing on the power of the storytelling techniques that make a great movie so engrossing, and using them to make classroom lessons equally engrossing. I really believe that this is powerful stuff, and that by using technology effectively we can multiply its power.   This is really the next step from what I wrote in my recent post PowerPoint is the Enemy of Effective Communication!

When I have given this talk in the past, I’ve always handed out a list of resources which I thought would be helpful to teachers as they begin to implement the ideas that I shared. This is always been a single sheet of paper, basically a list of links. I’ve never really been happy with it, and I always felt there was a lot more that should be included. This time, I decided to do something about that. So, for the first time I’m giving a “digital handout.”  I want to share it with any of you who may be interested. It’s not completely finished yet, what I’ve done so far is an annotated list of software and hardware tools, which I felt would be useful and a few books as well. What I haven’t finished yet is going through the pages and pages of notes that I have on potential sources for content to use in presentations (images, audio clips, video segments and much more,) but that will be coming soon. Besides, I was shocked when I finished the first part of my list and discovered that it was over 2800 words. If you want to take a look, find it at http://andydolph.com/cmtc.  Understand, this list is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather a selective list of tools that I recommend. If you think there’s something that I should look at to include, please let me know about it in the comments below.

Well, that’s actually not entirely true. PowerPoint itself is not the enemy of effective communication, but the way it’s used is.

Do your audiences stay awake?

Of course, PowerPoint is a tool and, like any other tool, it can be used for good or evil; effectively or ineffectively. The problem is more than just people using PowerPoint ineffectively, rather I think the problem is that PowerPoint begs to be used ineffectively. What do I mean? Well, look at virtually any PowerPoint presentation you see. The vast majority of them look basically the same, slide after slide after slide of bullet points. Essentially, an outline of the presentation projected on the screen. Sometimes it’s even worse, more often than I care to admit I see the actual (spoken) text of the presentation projected on the screen.

So what’s wrong with that? First is that it’s incredibly boring. It’s also distracting and not useful.

“But wait,” I hear you cry, “isn’t it useful and valuable to present information through multiple senses”

Yes! It absolutely is, when it’s done well. Each medium, each sense has ways in which it is best communicated with in the context of the presentation. Screen after screen of text confuses me, it doesn’t help me to know what’s important, and if all the content of the presentation is projected and why do I need you to stand there reading it to me. There is a better way. I’ll get to that shortly.

Remember, I said that PowerPoint begs to be used ineffectively. Open a new PowerPoint presentation, choose a template if you must (and most of them are mediocre at best) and what you get? The first default slide is the title page, that’s reasonable. Okay, now create another new slide, what you get? A bulleted list. An empty page asking to be filled with text.

In the earlier versions of PowerPoint it was even worse.  Trying to be helpful, Microsoft included an auto content Wizard. An automatic process for creating any type of presentation that you needed to give. The very idea that a few simple forms could create even the skeleton for most type of presentation you would give drives me crazy.

This was taken to it’s illogical, and extremely humorous extreme by Peter Norvig when he imagined (now rather famously) what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had used a PowerPoint auto content Wizard to create the Gettysburg Address.  You can see the results on his website http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/ Also very worth reading are his “making of” article and his article PowerPoint: shot with its own bullets.

There is another way!

PowerPoint can be an amazing tool to support a presentation when it’s used well. The key word is SUPPORT! The PowerPoint visuals should support the presentation that you were giving verbally. How can you do that effectively? Use the visual medium for what it does best: images.

Use the PowerPoint to punctuate what you’re saying with images, brief quotes, illustrations, backdrops and other things that help you to tell the story.

The story is the key

When you go to create a presentation, don’t open PowerPoint first! Start by laying out the story you want to tell. What is its beginning, middle, and end. Look for ways to create an emotional flow, and a payoff, and emotional reason for going along with you on the journey that you were inviting your audience to take. You may find that this is useful to do in an outline, or you may like mind mapping (which is how almost all of my presentations start), or you may work in narrative, or some other way. Whatever you do, lay out the story first.

Once that’s done, now you have a framework. Look for aspects of the story that are particularly important, now search for the visuals that either punctuate, demonstrate, or otherwise support those turns of the story. Where do you find them, lots of places — stay tuned for a post on that coming soon.

Now I think that there are times when that most effective “image” may be a few words. But it’s very, very few words.   In his e-book Really Bad PowerPoint and How To Avoid It, Seth Godin says “no more than six words on a slide. EVER.”  I think he’s got the right idea, although I’m not as militant about it as he is. I think there are a few situations where more than six words on a slide may make sense. Occasionally, I think putting the text of a longer quote on the screen can be effective. If you’re teaching a hands-on class, putting a list of instructions on the screen for the class to follow can work in some situations.  And very, very, very rarely a bulleted list may even be appropriate  to show a large variety of choices or something of that sort.

In my world, effectiveness comes from emotional engagement. As you create your presentation, whatever the topic, I believe there is nothing more important then finding a way for your audience to connect emotionally with the story you are telling.

What do you think?  I look forward to your comments.