The first game development workshop I held on November 16 was quite successful and more important a lot of fun! The students were very motivated to learn how games are being developed and I was very positively surprised how easily they followed my Mini Mario Kart sample.

As promised earlier on this blog and also during the workshop, I finally put up my slides for everyone to have a look at. Get them here and feel free to comment and leave some suggestions

Looking to plan your next birthday party?  Well then we suggest that you come on down to the Beach and plan a get together that the whole family can enjoy.  Our party packages have something for everyone regardless of age.  And, for the adults don’t think we have forgotten about you, we enjoy watching every Saturday and Sunday as you relive your inner child during your child’s birthday.  Take a look at the fun this family had at our latest party and I think you will agree that a birthday is something that everyone can celebrate both child and adult.

Thanks, everyone, for participating in our discussion, “Engaging Faculty.”  Here’s a recording of the presentation.  It will launch in Elluminate and it includes the slides, audio and chat.

In case you’d rather flip through the presentation at your own pace without Elluminate, here are the slides (.pdf) and the chat (.pdf).

Comments are welcome.

Photo: Stock.Xchng

Scared of Presentations?

5 Easy Steps Towards Better Presentation Skills

Everyone has heard the urban legend that states “more people are afraid of public speaking, than death.”

Tirelessly, I looked for some data along these lines, but I was unable to find any such figures; however, I dug up an article in the Archives of General Psychology that claimed that one in three respondents reported “excessive anxiety” when they spoke to “large audiences. This study, conducted by three doctors with impressive acronyms, also reported that the onset of this fear appeared in half of the study by 13 years of age and that 90 percent of the study were shaking at the podium by the age of 20.

I thought I’d do my part to relieve this anxiety by making presentations a little easier with these personal tips. These tips were loosely – honestly, the loosest of loose – based on George Mason University’s The Short Guide To Effective Presentations.

So here is the skinny.

1. Know your mission: Determine your purpose by establishing what you want your audience to know and how you would like them to act on this knowledge.

2. Establish your target: (target audience that is) Analyze your audience and tailor your message according to their age, general education level, knowledge about your topic and attitude toward the topic.

3. Gather intelligence: Gather enough information to write an effective presentation, then adjust the information as to avoid overwhelming the audience with too much information. Remember, It’s better to recall all of some, than none of all.

4. Operational Pictures: Add interest with relevant images. Never add a photo that doesn’t add to the message or embody the emphasis of the topic. Only use charts, graphs or illustrations if they are simple enough to understand and increase the audience’s understanding.

5. Train: Practice, practice, practice and then? Practice! Ideally, research your topic until you feel like an expert. When you feel comfortable with the content, run through the presentation. Preferably, practice out loud with your visuals. If at all possible, record your practice and make notes about: eye contact, movements, uses of gestures, tone, enthusiasm, pace and voice projection.

Quicksprout blogger, Neil Pate, points out that this recorded practice run can be a great tool to catch errors because “You usually don’t notice when you say ‘uhm’, ‘ah’, or any other useless word frequently, but the audience does. It gets quite irritating.” Pate also recommends that you “Show some movement – People are more engaged with an animated speaker.”

A quick word on the visuals – I’ve never fancied myself as a great writer, but I’m a solid writer. More importantly, I’m good with visuals and drawing interest. I’m not saying that visuals will carry your presentation, but visuals can garner attention and carry interest through your content. For expert advice on your visual layout and slides, most specifically for PowerPoint and Keynote, I recommend that you check out Presentation Zen.

The visual rule of thumb is to keep it simple. Pate warns, “Whatever your visuals may be, keep them simple and don’t put too many words on them. The audience isn’t there to read your slides, they are there to listen to you present.”

If you need more insight, this You Tube video provides comical parody into the problems associated with, in this instance, PowerPoint presentations and zealous naivety.

.

Un altro Natale e noi siamo sempre…in palla !

Si, quest’anno sembra che le palle di Natale siano state il nostro tema preferito , anche se non è il solo e cito per esempio i  bigliettini di auguri.

Come sempre eccovi uno slide di assaggio e… mi raccomando, occhio alla palla… in NATALE cards 3- Gallery

.

!!!

We have a great party rental channel at www.youtube.com/astronorthsd

You can check it out and tell me what you think?

I mean, really. How hard is it to scan some slides in, huh?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44834073@N04/sets/

The first set is too blue, the second too red. Kodachrome has some lovely, golden colours. They’re not here…

(some of the results don’t look half too bad though)

I’ll be giving a workshop on the Echo Nest API at the Boston Music Hack Day.  Here are the slides – but you should really come to the workshop if you can – the slides don’t have all the music, video or presenter awesomeness that you’ll get at the live workshop. Hope to see you there.

Here is a wonderful example from Don McMillan of where many presentations go wrong. This is funny and entertaining, as it is meant to be, but the point is really well made. Overloading your audience with slide after slide of bullet points to read and lots of animations and graphics makes it a real challenge for the audience to understand your message far less remember it. Presentations should be about making it as easy as possible for the audience to get the point. When you are thinking about creating any presentation, no matter how informal or how short, consider:

• What one thing do you want the audience to know, understand or do differently as a result?
• What does the audience want to know/need to know in order for you to achieve that change?
• How much of what you are proposing to present is really necessary for the audience to understand the “one thing”?
• How can you illustrate your message in pictures?

I’m always in catch up mode with my reading. I finally got to Ian Glazer’s “Access Certification and Entitlement Management” on a plane to California. If you are in the market for access certification, trying to understand how to construct and approach to managing entitlements or just want to understand the moving parts of access in any reasonably complex organization, then this is a must read. What got me thinking most was the tone of the paper. Essentially it boils down to the good advice to make sure you define boundaries for tasks well and get the people from the business who should own the information to become the owners by the end of the process. Ian also encourages you to use whatever resources you can, even if they make strange bedfellows. It reminded me very much (and I’m going to mix analyst firms here so forgive me) of Earl Perkin’s thoughts about making the auditor your friend and making sure you “care, but not too much”, which he communicated at the Gartner IAM Summit last week (and blogged about previously as well).

All this got me thinking about the actual content of such IT to business communication regarding access certification. And, since I was trapped on a 6+ hour flight with a power outlet but no internet, I came up with this small, tongue in cheek video. I know the terms will feel like nails on a chalkboard to some since they are not exact. But I really tried to exercise that “it’s more important that they get the right ideas and not the exact right terminology” notion as best I could.

You’re really found of India, Rajasthan and argentic, don’t you? The Guru exhibition makes you travel with a portraits gallery (guru, Sâdhu, prince and princess) from the first part of the twentieth century. Opening on 20 November @ Brutal’s: 13 rue de la Forge Royale, 75011 Paris - from 18h30

Related posts: 

Paris: “Koyasan”, the photo exhibition of Yoshimitsu Nagasaka 

Photoquai, Paris: Second Biennial Exhibition of World Images

Young Gallery, Brussels: Exhibition of Nick Brandt, “A Shadow Falls”  

!!!

We can “Deck the Halls,” “Swab the deck,” and even “Deck someone” …. (though I wouldn’t endorse trying the last one!).

Obviously, the word “deck” can mean a lot of things.

But, nowhere does a deck equate to a presentation!

When I coach executives for presentation skills, typically they say, “The deck is being prepared.” I then ask, “What about the presentation?”

From my perspective as an executive speech coach and professional speaker for more years than I like to admit, an effective presentation needs to be crafted first BEFORE slides are created.

Then, and only then, if the visuals will support the message, should a slide “deck” be crafted, too.

Preparing slides has become so easy that it’s now commonplace for presenters to simply read their slides – which is never a formula for speaking success.

Show me one example of a presentation where the audience wanted more slides.

The speaker needs to be the most important visual element.

How?

Through effective use of eye contact, facial expression, gestures and movements to captivate an audience — plus having a good, descriptive story to tell. Then, you can add a visual to help paint a picture or make a point.

So, in the future, prepare your presentation — then get all decked out!

This week my supervisor, two of my office mates (Amir and Payam) and I have been working hard putting together a presentation we’ve recorded for a conference in Algeria on Sunday.

I laid out the slides in Keynote, using my color scheme (luckily the others were OK with the pink). We’ve been impressed with how easy it has been to record in Keynote, although I think due to the number of takes there are some glitches where the audio doesn’t quite match with the slides.

It’s taken longer than expected – I think we all got quite perfectionist, and when checking it the playback always started from the beginning – meaning with each additional person it took longer to check everything was working OK! Also – I hate listening to myself present. I say “So…” at the start of every slide!

The slides are available on slideshare (I’ve embedded it below). You may notice that my section is very similar to the presentation I prepared the other week, although I’ve had to add some text to the slides. You can also download the QuickTime movie here (it’s Benyoucef.mov and note – the first section is in French) my section starts at around 32:30.

As ever – let me know what you think!