Effective Presentations

For the past few class periods we have sat through a number of various presentations and some obviously stood out above the rest as better presentations. A thought that I would like to process through this blog is what makes a great presentation and what makes another boring. I believe that technology has a role in this and can work for or against the presentors.

A pet peeve that I have developed is when the person goes up to the front and seems to have spent a decent amount of time preparing the information to present in a power point form and he or she simply read the information off of each slide. To me this is incredibly boring. I do not see why people see reading off of a power point as much different than reading their notes. Because the only difference in my opinion is that you can make the words move, the audience can see the notes and there may be a cool background. This is an example when technology has become a crutch in the art of presenting. The time taken to prepare the power point only brings out a boring slide show rather than a stimulating presentation. So I think that if a person chooses to use technology they should make an effort to spice it up a bit with interaction, inflection in their tone, better eye contact, the ability to move around, and not as much detail on the slide but providing that detail in explanation when presenting.
People are using technology out of convenience, because sometimes it does not require much creativity. And because the technology is between the presenter and his or her audience, a social distance is formed... where the notion that people can feel like they can approch the presenter is lost.

I frankly admired the people who got the audience involved, smiled, seemed to have fun up front... and unfortunately only and handful of my classmates come to mind. More information is not always better. Personality, simplicity and quality is more widely appreciated.