This semester I'm teaching three classes on presentation for undergraduates at my university in Japan. On the second day, I have students share with the class what they think are the elements of a good presentation and what they think are the kinds of things that make for a bad or ineffective presentation. Students may still be quite young, but they have sat through years of classes in school and lectures in college, sat through orientation meetings, and they have seen many kinds of presentations online such as TED talks over the years, so students actually do have quite a bit of experience with various kinds of presentations.


I use a slide like this or just write something similiar on the whiteboard. "Think about the best and the worst presentations you have ever seen. What's the difference? What made the good ones good and the bad ones bad from your point of view? What are the elements of a good presentation, including visuals (if any), preparation, delivery, etc. What was happening during the presentations that you identified as 'bad'?"

Activity
For the activity I ask students to break up into groups of 4-5 to share their ideas—based on their experience—on what makes for a good presentation and what makes for a bad presentation. I give them about 20 minutes. One person in each group keeps notes using a t-chart with "Good" on one side and "Bad" on the other. Before this we discuss a bit on what we mean by "Good." A good or effective presentation, from the point of few of the audience, being one where the audience was engaged and learned something, but also was motivated, or inspired, etc. in addition to being informed. After students have discussed their ideas and they have a "good/bad" list, they then put that info on the walls around the room, edit as they like, and then finally share their ideas with the rest of the class.



There is no right or wrong answer for the exercise I tell them. The point is to share their ideas based on their real-life experience and to get a conversation started, a discussion that will last the entire semester. The point of the exercise, besides being a good icebreaker, is to introduce many of the concepts we will be talking about for the next 15 weeks, but in this case the ideas are coming from them, not just from "a professor" at the front of the room. "You know this stuff all ready" I tell them, but there is a difference between knowing it and having the skills—and eventually the courage—to actually do it. The students identify many classic elements of a good presentation of talk. Below is a list of some of the more common elements identified by the students. This is a rough assembly of the items that students, numbering more than 100 in total came up with. Each element is quite commonsensical, perhaps, but common sense is not common practice. We'll spend the reset of the semester learning the principles, techniques, and practices of 21st-century presentation.

Elements of a "Good" & "Bad" presentation
Here is a list that a group of about one hundred young Japanese college students came up with this week.

Students listing their ideas on the whiteboard. Then we have a class discussion on what they think are the most important elements and why. A chance to share the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly based on their own experience.

A presentation is a moment in time. I have long referenced jazz and my own experience with jazz as having a great parallel to the act of a live talk or a presentation on the center stage. One thing that a live talk and a musical performance have in common—especially improvisational music—is that neither event is ever the same twice. They may be similar, they may cover similar ground, but they are never exactly the same. The message—the real meaning—is in the moment, in that interaction between audience and performer (or presenter). In this interview with London Real, famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson relates Miles Davis's idea that you can not do again what you just did.

Tyson: The talk is my interaction with your live audience.
Below is the transcript from Dr. Tyson's riff on the importance of spontaneity and being in the moment.

"When you create—and it's on he spot and it's live—it's something that's never been created before even if the notes are the same on the page. The moment defines the creative expression. I feel that way when I give talks. When I give a talk, there are hosts of that event who will say: 'Oh, could you send your talk in advance?' No. The talk is the talk I give at that time, in that moment, to that audience. There is no 'talk in advance.' If I could send a talk in advance, I would do that and I would stay home. The talk is my interaction with your live audience. That's the talk." (emphasis mine.)

When I heard Dr. Tyson speak to the absurdity of "sending your talk ahead of time" in this interview, I practically fell out of my chair. I have been saying the same thing for more years than I can remember. It's just common sense. And yet it's refreshing to hear it from such great speaker and respected communicator of science as Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yes, dear conference organizers, please stop asking people to send their presentations in advance.

Related links
• "Slideuments" and the catch-22 for conference speakers
• Advice for conference presenters
• Advice on giving technical presentations

H/T @brainslides

In this 7-minute video below, Danny Hillis shares two wonderful short stories about the legendary physicist Richard Feynman. Hillis is a well known engineer, scientist, and inventor who, in his younger years, was lucky enough to spend a good deal of time with Feynman. There are many ways Hillis could have used his time to talk about the amazing Richard Feynman, but he chose to simply tell two short stories from his personal experience. And it was a very good idea to do so.

A good story does not have to be slick or polished or augmented with amazing visuals. Often a good story just needs to be authentic, from the heart, and told in the spirit of contribution. That is, a story well told is a gift to the audience, it is designed for the audience. What they do with it is up to them, but it is created and told for them. Once we tell the story the ownership is no longer ours. But if it is created and told in the spirit of an offering for them and not merely as an exercise of egotism for us, then it just may make an impact and have lasting resonance. The example by Hillis above is simple and seemingly unremarkable, perhaps. But I think it works very well, and he leaves us with at least two good, memorable takeaways, pieces of wisdom from Richard Feynman himself.

Even if Richard Feynman had not been a great communicator, he'd still be famous today for the incredible contributions he made to physics. The fact is, however, Feynman was indeed a great communicator as well as a Nobel-Prize winning physicist. Who knew the two could go together? Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and advocate of the public understanding of science, says in his "ASU Origins Project: Storytelling Of Science" talk that Feynman's abilities as a communicator inspired him to want to be a scientist. "What was amazing about Feynman was that he conveyed his excitement and his interest and the integrity of science." For Feynman "science was an adventure," Krauss says. "Everything in life [for Feynman] was an adventure. Learning—just the pleasure of finding things out." Feynman's passion for learning and for teaching physics was infectious, says Krauss.

While researching Feynman's lectures, I stumbled on to a fantastic YouTube channel called SciShow. One of their videos is a 10-minute presentation called Richard Feynman, The Great Explainer, part of their Great Minds series of presentations. I like the simple, quirky, visual way they present the story of Feynman here. Watch it below.

The communication of science
There are many great scientists, and there are many people who are skilled at explaining things, even complicated, technical phenomena. Unfortunately, being a great scientist and being a great explainer often are thought to be mutually exclusive. Your own experience may suggest that remarkable communicators of science are very rare, but I wonder how much of this is merely an example of confirmation bias. The narrative of the day, after all, is that men and women of science are not skilled communicators, nor should they be. But this is a myth and sometimes even a lazy excuse for bad teaching and dull, lifeless explanations. Not all great scientists need to be remarkable teachers or inspiring, engaging communicators of science. But certainly a scientist who is charged with also teaching others must necessarily be a good teacher.

On learning the joy of finding things out
Much of his visual and clear approach to explaining things, says Feynman, he learned as a small child from his father. "Everything we would read we would translate, as best we could, to some reality. So that I learned to do that—everything that I would read I would try to figure out what it really means, what it's really saying." Translating abstract ideas into concrete realities that one can see is a simple, natural, and highly engaging way of learning and also of explaining even difficult to comprehend ideas.

 

As a father of two very small children myself, I adore this clip above of Feynman recalling lessons he learned about learning—or the joy of finding things out, as Feynman calls it—from his father. Feynman says his father knew the difference between knowing the name of something and really knowing something. "That's the way I was educated by my father, with those kind of examples and discussions. No pressure. Just lovely, interesting discussions." I'll take a child who is deeply curious and intrinsically motivated to pursue the joy of finding things out rather than one who is supremely obedient, and deeply motivated by pressure and extrinsic rewards. Unfortunately schools—even some elementary schools—are designed for the most part to nurture the latter.

There is not a device invented that can measure the joy I have in watching a Richard Feynman lecture. The man was not only a brilliant, Nobel Prize winning scientist, he was a great teacher and communicator of science as well. In this lecture by physicist Brian Cox—in this case speaking to school children for an event at Manchester University—I noticed that Cox played a one-minute clip (14:45 mark) from a Richard Feynman lecture given in the 1960s. Cox set up the clip by saying that it was one of the best definitions of science, or the scientific method, that he'd ever heard. Clear and simple and told in less than a minute. Watch below.



"If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong...."
Here is a transcript from the clip:

"In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it (audience laughter), no, don’t laugh, that’s really true. Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature, or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.

If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

A bit more on the scientific method (in 10 minutes)
Below is the same clip with an additional nine minutes where Feynman explains, among other things, that guessing is not unscientific. "It is not unscientific to take a guess, although many people who are not in science believe that it is."

Feynman was a great communicator in part because he continually gave examples or told personal stories to illustrate his message. My favorite one here is his telling of his response to a person he met who believed that UFO sightings were real and evidence of extraterrestrial life visiting earth. "So I said I don't believe in flying saucers. My antagonist says 'Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove it's impossible?' I said no, I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely!" Feynman goes on to say that it is scientific to say what is more likely and what is less likely. Feynman summed up his reply to the man who believed in flying saucers like this:

"It is much more likely that the reports on flying saucers are the result of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence, rather than the unknown rational efforts of extraterrestrial intelligence. It's just more likely, that's all. And it's a good guess. We always try to guess the most likely explanation, keeping in the back of our mind that if it doesn't work, then we must discuss the other possibilities."

Link
• Loads of Feynman lectures on video.