"Presentation Magic" (I love Ted Talks!)

     I really enjoyed the Ted talk video featuring speaker Hans Rosling.  Hans spoke with such passion and everything he said made a whole lot of sense.  I’m starting to become addicted to Ted Talks because all the speakers are such passionate experts in their fields.  It makes me believe that being a genius has a hell of a lot to do with passion.  Rosling first explained that there are 8 brilliant development goals founded by the UN.  These goals are all backed up by statistics and basically common sense as to what basic things need to change in order for a country to be both happy and healthy.  Rosling is so passionate about the goals because they really seem to get to the root of the problem unlike “political talking” which he clearly views as a bad thing.  I mean, you know what they say, talk is cheap.  There’s been so many times where I just clicked off the news because of political figures in our country giving people false hope that the world will magically be okay once they get a bill passed or a new law approved.  I don’t mean to be cynical but I guess I’m just a realist on the matter.  Rosling tries to prove that there are different ideas on how we can fix these worldly problems.  He backed up these ideas with the help of a presentation he created using organized research without compromising his passion on the subject.

     He first presented the main focus of the presentation in a way that sucked viewers in.  He had a hook.   He definitely hooked me in.  Maybe the audience initially didn’t really care about what the subject was but I think Rosling used his passion and confident opinion in order to make people interested.  He then supported his subject by using slides with data and graphs which we’ve learned this week is just PROOF when it comes to a good presentation.  We should keep the proof on the slides, like Rosling so nicely did.  If the graph had colors, he explained the colors.  He used his slides as being the back drop of the presentation rather the main focus.  His slides help compare, contrast, and tell an over all story.  His words were the main focus but at the same time his words would have meant nothing without the slides.  Good presentations need to have this sort of balance.  He explained hard statistics with the graphs.  He added symbols to these graphs as he was explaining the trends versus all at once.  Sometimes people see something like a graph on the presentation and its like "BAM" okay wow that’s confusing and then they just kind of drone off into space because they are no longer engaged.  I’m not speaking from experience or anything ;)  His animations were also used to help the audience understand his main point.  The animations were cool because they were used in a really effective way versus his animations only being cool because they were pretty and tech savvy.  

     He kept to the point without being boring.  I loved this talk, not only because I agreed with him, but mostly because of his passion.  He wanted people to understand what he was passionate about so he found the wisdom and inner genius to make it happen which resulted in the production of a great presentation.  He ends with a great conclusion too, one that makes you think which is the absolute key to a great presentation.  He summarizes the key notes of the presentation and than uses those key notes to branch out into bigger ideas.  A good presentation seems to follow the outline of a good research paper!  A presentation is just much more creative and fun :)