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The twilight of presentations?

Albert Camus famously said, “Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.”

Okay, very funny, Albert. But given the research coming out of universities demonstrating that students generally have poor retention of information delivered by the 600 year old tradition of the lecture, Mr. Camus may have been on to something.

Go to www.harvardmagazine.com  to read the article entitled Twilight of the Lecture.

600 years ago, during the Renaissance, the primary source of information was the university, and since books were rare and expensive, one went to university to listen to the great men speak. And, while you listened, you took notes.

(There’s a quip in the article that says lectures are a way of transferring the professor’s lecture notes to students’ notebooks without passing through the brains of either. That rings true for me. I remember scribbling notes and then not being able to read my own handwriting.)

Now we don’t rely on universities to give us information: it comes at us from everywhere. We can sit in a taxicab and listen to people lecture. We can read wikis at Walden Pond. We don’t have to go to class to get information.

So what are universities for? Well, it turns out they are still good places to discover information, but they’re also good places to assimilate and make sense of information, especially if you have a chance to match your ideas against the ideas of your peers, which is where real learning begins, for two reasons. 1.) Students are better at influencing students than are professors because they (students) are closer to the way their friends think, and thus quicker to diagnose common student-like errors of reasoning, and 2.) When one student has the right answer and the other doesn’t, the first one is more likely to convince the second because it’s hard to talk someone into the wrong answer when they have the right one.

Around the country, some professors are trying to transfer information before class, and use class time to assimilate and make sense of the information. To do this, they record their lectures so that students can watch them on video in the privacy of their own dorm rooms. Then the students are asked to post questions to the course website, and then when they arrive at class, a student-sourced question is displayed, and the students are given time to think about the question and commit to an answer.

Once they’ve decided, they select their answers with their cell phones. Responses are compiled by a central computer that does not display the total tally.

If between 30% to 70% get it right, one professor in the article moves on to peer instruction: students find a neighbor with a different answer and make a case for their own response. Each tries to convince the other. Meanwhile the teacher eavesdrops, listening for incorrect reasoning so that he can sensitize himself to the difficulties that beginners face.

All very interesting to me, whose job it is to help people learn how to build a highly effective, persuasive message AND acquire the stage presence necessary to deliver it well.

What is the relevance for presentation skills training and corporate training in general? A few thoughts:

1. First, training is all about assimilating and making sense of information, making it work in a particular business setting. And most presentation training is highly interactive, experiential, and peer-oriented. We are constantly going off into breakouts and debating with one another.

2. Asking business people to read the information before the training program is a good idea. Not sure if it’s possible to get them to do it. They’re busy, but nevertheless, I think we could do a better job of that.

3. Posting questions to the instructor before the training session sounds good too. Many of us already do that in the form of pre-training questionnaires. The big issue is whether trainees will read the material (or watch the video) with enough curiosity and passion to generate questions.

4. Starting the training program, not with a presentation from the instructor but with a series of questions sourced from the participants, assumes that everyone has been exposed to the information. Not sure that assumption will always be accurate. Nevertheless, why lecture people on stuff they’ve already read, or do not find relevant. Why not speak to them about what is foremost on their minds concerning the given topic?

5. I love the idea of answering questions through my cell phone and then defending my answer against someone with another answer. That, I think, is where real learning happens, and where good persuasive speaking begins (and good listening too). You realize that if you feel in your gut that you have the right answer, you are far more persuasive than someone who is not so certain.

I still think there is a runway for lectures and presentations, especially good ones. Even the Harvard prof in the article is giving lectures about the twilight of lectures. (The writer includes this irony without even hinting that he might be aware that it is an irony.)

Here’s the deal about lectures, according to my wife, who did go to Harvard. Their impact depends to a large extent on the quality of the lecturer. A good lecturer does more than give information. He is a priest, a proselytizer, a sermonizer whose mission must be to ignite the intellectual passions of his students. His enthusiasm must be contagious. He must sell his topic and make his information exciting and alluring. He can best do that face-to-face with a live body of students.

Furthermore, what ever happened to the precept, or the tutorial at Harvard? Don’t the students go to big lectures, and then break up into smaller groups to discuss and debate what the professor said, and what the reading has brought to their attention?

In some way, I think the business world is ahead of academia. We in business know how hard it is to get people to change, to learn new ways of thinking, to assimilate new information about the market, our workflow, and our own new products. And we know also that such change and growth is not entirely an intellectual process, and not entirely occasioned by “information.”

Computers transfer information. People—peers, lecturers, and presenters–get through to other people, and that can be decisive.