Assigment #4

Powerpoint was developed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate with the marketing department vice versa. PowerPoint can communicate ideas faster and faster. It could be the most powerful tool on our coputer, but it is not. Many innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to.
Communication is the transfer of emotion
Communication means to present our points of view to others. And to help them understand our emotion. Giving facts and figures logic is not enough in presenting our ideas. The reason we do presentations is to sell one or more ideas. If we believe our idea, we can sell it.
Four components to a great presentation:
1) make ourself cue cards and put them in our hand.
2) make slides that reinforce our words, not repeat them. It has more effet on the audience.
3) create a written doument and give it to the audience at the end of presentation, not before it!
4) create a feedback cycle when we need it.
Bullets are for the NRA
Five rules to create an amazing PowerPoint presentation:
1) No more than six words on a slide
2) No cheesy images
3) No dissolves, spins or other transitions
4) Sound effects can be used
5) Don't hand out print-outs of your slides
Key points about cognitive load theory:

• working memory is limited when we are learning new information
• In a classroom, only limited material is going to be retained
• PowerPoint presentationis not a success if the information on the screen is the same as what we want to say

The science of PowerPoint Overload

According to cognitive scientist, there are three features of the human information processing system:

1) dual channels

2) limited capacity

3) active processing

Reduce visual overload by moving text from the screen and bring the processing into auditor channel. The science of PowerPoint is there, it is up to us to deny it or accept it and change. Cliff's notes that can be used for PowerPoint:

• show some picture when the slides contain only words
• stop repeatition
• get ride of extra things
• break up slides that take too much time
• keep it simple