I attented a GREAT session at FETC on Thursday: Stategies for Successful Presentations.
The speaker, Lynnell Burmark, was witty and insightful … and, as you might anticipate given the title, the visuals were really, really good.
Some things that hit me as worth remembering:
- always fade to a black slide for transitions: movies have conditioned people to think that fade to black means shut up and pay attention; something new is coming
- reading slides (you know, those horribly presentations where someone faces the screen and reads their painfully boring slides) actually results in negative learning. Lynnel referenced a book by Richard Mayer, Multimedia Learning for this point. I intend to pick up the book – it looks great.
- viewing positive images (a flower, etc.) boost your immune system for up to 6 hours (I didn’t hear a reference for this claim)
- each ear has about 30,000 nerve connections to the brain, but each eye has about 1 million connections
- memory recall is 80% better when you use color
- yellow and red are the two colors that capture the eye most
- 6 x 6 rule: never use more than 6 words on a line and 6 lines on a screen for a presentation
The room was jammed, and everyone enjoyed the session. Lynell promised to post a PDF of her presentation on her site, but the site appears to be down right now …