Teaching with Classroom Response Systems
Resources for engaging and assessing students with clickers
Audience Response in Professional Presentations
Author: derekbruff24 Apr
Chris Iufer of Duarte Design posted a great blog entry earlier this week on using free-response audience feedback during a presentation by Nancy Duarte at the Web 2.0 Expo. Chris describes the process he used to determine how to collect and display this feedback. He first enlisted his colleagues to help him think about the potential audience for this presentation, then applied the results of that activity to decisions regarding the use Twitter, Poll Everywhere, and the Meebo chat room service.
I follow the Duarte Design blog because I was impressed with what I’ve seen of Nancy Duarte’s book on presentations, slide:ology. (Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen is another great book on designing and delivering presentations.) As you might imagine, my interest in classroom response systems has led to an interest in effective presenting, which in turn has led to an interest in visual explanations (e.g., the great “In Plain English” videos produced by Common Craft), visual thinking (e.g., the organization VizThink and Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin), and even graphic facilitation (e.g., Peter Durand’s Center for Graphic Facilitation blog).
I find it exciting when some of my varied interests overlap. For instance, when Garr (Presentation Zen) Reynolds blogged about the comic book created by Scott McCloud that Google used to explain its new Web browser Chrome, I found my worlds colliding. I’ve followed Scott McCloud’s work since reading his book Understanding Comics years ago, thanks to my interest in comic books in high school, and I’ve come to appreciate his ability to explain complex ideas in words and pictures (that is, using comics). Putting comics, visual explanations, and Web technology all in one blog post made for an interesting read for me, to say the least.
Back to Chris Iufer’s post about audience feedback. He ended up using the Meebo service, which worked well for him. (I think Poll Everywhere would have done the job well, too, had he used the free-text response option.) He asked in his post, “Have you ever participated in a live poll during a presentation? What was your experience like? Is this something you would do in one of your presentations?”
His questions remind me that some of the challenges and opportunites we see in using classroom response systems in the world of higher ed are becoming relevant to other domains, including the domain of professional presentations that Duarte Design knows well. Here’s another domain: I know of a couple of churches that have experimented with Poll Everywhere for audience feedback during their pastor’s sermons. I hope that our worlds will collide a little more often in the future so that those of us in these various arenas can learn from each other.
2 Responses for "Audience Response in Professional Presentations"
I really enjoyed your input on this. It hadn’t occurred to me that the K12 system has already been there–done that in regards to audience polling. I asked my wife (a California HS teacher) about clickers after reading your comment and she confirmed that they use them in various class exercises. *smacks forehead. Clickers were outside the bounds of Nancy’s needs, but it’s still a viable solution to the root problem.
I guess I missed out when I was in school because this kind of technology would have been a real highlight in my day. Your revelation about crossing domains is gold. I don’t doubt that we have a lot to learn and share with the Education community because upon deeper analysis we are really trying to solve the same problems.
Thanks for the comment. I’ve learned a lot about presentations from the Duarte Design blog (and the other resources I mentioned in my post), but until now, I’ve seen little in the world of presentation design about technology-enhanced audience feedback / interactivity has been made. It’s great to see some connections being made on that topic.
Backchannel feedback of this sort poses a couple of related challenges, I think. One is the technological challenge you described in your post. The other is the facilitation challenge: How does one respond productively during or after a presentation to this kind of backchannel? And there’s potential for a nice intersection of solutions here. It would be great to see software that can meaningfully aggregate, summarize, or visualize free-response backchannel feedback. A tool like that would potentially make free-response feedback as easy to leverage as clicker responses shown on a bar chart.
And here’s a little more on that other domain I mentioned, church services. Time has an article out today on pastors encouraging their church members to Twitter during sermons. You raise a good point in your blog about the public nature of Twitter. I can see something like Meebo or Poll Everywhere having value in church settings since attendees could participate in the backchannel more anonymously.
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