The Sesame Street Presentation Rule

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It was memorable enough for Sean to take the time to leave a comment, so I’d say it’s a success!

I apologize for the inadvertent endorsement. I was actually asserting this point: despite what the internet spouts constantly, there is no blanket rule for excellent presentations. No “3 simple things” you can do to ensure a memorable keynote. No “amazingly easy change” that will spice up your speeches and make you a perfect presenter.

Speaking well in public takes practice. Being a top-notch orator requires skill, timing, attention to detail, audience awareness, and a hundred other tiny but crucial pieces. Passion is helpful and entertainment has its place, but many topics require other approaches to engage the audience. I would walk out of the conference hall if I attended a talk on TurboGears or whatever and the presenter’s “primary goal was to entertain me.”

Please stop trying to distill every topic to a single nugget of wisdom. I know it’s chic and all the other blogs are doing it, but it makes your posts content-free (and often misleading).

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Nice idea.

Perhaps a follow-up post on ways one might entertain with a presentation, as you suggest?

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Speaking from a CUSEC viewpoint, I don’t think Jeff’s primary goal was to entertain us, but to convey information. Which he managed to pull off in an entertaining manner. Do what you love, and share it with the world :slight_smile:

Thanks again, Jeff, for coming out and spending time with us. Speakers like you are what makes CUSEC memorable for everyone.

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Personally i do not have a problem with the The Sesame Street Presentation Rule but you’ve to ask yourself this : what audience was Sesame Street presented to ? Answer : kids.the edutainment method is a reserve for kids and toddlers.Try teaching quantum physics or algorithms by this edutainment method.Things we learn are way complicated to explain or put across the “Sesame Street” way.I’ll say this only once : If you want your learning to be fun go watch Sesame Street but if you want to learn then take that book ,read ,try to understand and endure the boredom.Period.

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Since just about anyone has access to powerpoint, and it can be learnt with little training, the majority of slide presentations we see are full of text and boring as hell.

Microsoft Powerpoint, with it’s wealth of text centered templates, only encourages these sorts of presentations.

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Some of the best public speaking tips are of course from Dale Carnegie.

While entertainment may be one technique, you need to deliver the goods regardless, or the next day you feel a little cheated.

“Incidents” are a great lead-in. Pace, rhythm, voice inflection, a great sense of humor (and timing), asides, etc. are all excellent techniques too.

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Your talk was great, so if you applied those principles I’d say your points are right on the ball.

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When I first saw the title of this post, I remembered a comment a co-worker made about XP when it first came out. He said it was too “Fisher-Price”.

Anyway, about “Edu-tainment.” Its value may depend on the type of audience you have. If your presenting something that people are dying to hear, humor may not be needed. However, if you need to have the audience recognize some of their own flaws, humor will help. Its been said that laughter is a form of public confession. Humor then because an anesthetic to humility. Humility lets us learn something new.

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“Don’t forget to add the muppets!”

that should be on a t-shirt.

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I have to agree with this, but in our place, this doesn’t always comes in handy.

in most instances, the presenters are just there to entertain and barely tell something good. other times the audiences are too distracted with all the shiny thingies and barely follow original intended topic.

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I agree, if a presentation doesn’t hold my interest in some way, I’m getting no education from it.

I’d just hate to sit through a presentation by some of the people posting here who are against making it entertaining, like Sean and some of the others.

And you, in turn, would hate to have me in your audience. I’d be constantly distracting you by my yawning, and maybe even snoring.

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Sorry Jeff, I think you are dead wrong on this one. The golden rule of presentations is: respect your audience. Is your presentation topic relevant, well structured, and informative? As long as you are not deficient in public speaking skills, what more should be done? I strongly agree with Jonathan Levy’s comment - education is not the same as entertainment. Education only happens when the student puts forth the effort to learn. To your point, “tricking them” into wanting to learn may be effective. But isn’t there something wrong when adults spend thousands of dollars for education (tuition or conference fees) and the first thing they expect is to be entertained?

btw, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is a great book…

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I was at your talk at CUSEC and I definitely agree. When I think back to previous talks, it’s the talks that follow this principal (you, Zed Shaw, Chad Fowler, etc.) that are the most memorable to not just me, but most people I discovered.

Great job with your presentation.

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Nobody can teach someone.until his brain participate in that activity and your method is the best method to invite his brain for the learning activity

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Fun fact Jeff: the Sesame Street “short and to the point” format was a contributing factor to poor attention spans in children. A show full of twenty second ad clips turns out to be a detriment to children (according to the numerous psychological studies that caused change).

Sesame Street has since changed to much longer formats. Even the Count is upwards of a minute long clip now. And all he does is count to seven.

So slightly bad example :slight_smile:

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Hmm…
My opinion:
50% - Yes, your presentation must be entertaining.
50% - For pure entertainment, I will go somewhere else.

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Although I have been in disagreement with many of your posts, I am DEFINITELY going to seek to entertain my audiences from now on.

Thanks so much for sharing!

I wonder how the cookie moster will work on friday’s stakeholders meeting :slight_smile:

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At first, I think that “education” is not unique. In my head, 2 possible meanings are floating around.
At first, there is the entertainment we all know from TV, those “entertainers” that try to be fun and mostly make me get some headphones so I wont have to hear them anymore.

However, since I have learned some stuff about “entertaining games”, there is another - vastly different - form of entertainment floating in my head.
In a game, you have to create some form of motivation by entertaining the player. If you don’t motivate your player, he will close the game and go back to play World of Warcraft. But now, we have to look out. Most motivation in a game does NOT result from some lame jokes (or even some good ones), but by applying to very basic instincts.
You kill a monster? Hooray. My game will let 2 stars fly around, bounce around a bit and disappear. You killed a boss? Hooray. My game creates some big explosion and makes the screen shake and whatever.

This form of motivation and entertainment is far more universal than the first one, because it applies to your very basic instincts. Things flash! Things move! Things flashing and moving are great!

So, lets take this to our current topic:
I guess you can apply the same here. Trying to entertain some guys from the university with lame jokes during a presentation will fail. fail bad. (I guess this fails with most audiences.)
However, I think that the second form of motivation and entertainment should work as well.
For example, you could just encircle a problem with some red border, because this is a problem, and a problem is dangerous (and red == danger). However, don’t create a whole slide with a bright red background, because this just hurts in the eyes.
Generalizing this, you should be able to use colors to make text (if you really need that text!) more “entertaining”, or little gimmicks (for example, a really nice presentation by Audrey Tang used smileys a lot. Depending on the audience, you might not want a whole slide consist of just a frowning smiley, but still, I dont think it will enrage someone if your problem (encircled in red! :slight_smile: ) is followed by some sad smiley-face.)

So, I guess, you are right to a certain extend. You have to entertain the audience on a certain level, however, one has to choose that level and the tools of entertainment carefully.

Greetings,
Hk

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If you are normally funny, use humor in your presentations, as entertainment is an excellent tool to use when trying to keep an audience engaged. If you aren’t normally a class clown, don’t try injecting entertainment and fun, as it will come off as artificial and you’ll lose everyone. Just being genuinely excited about your topic is sufficient.

I was reminded of a study performed by a group of doctors that were in charge of educating other doctors on some especially boring material. Looking up the study again reveals this relevant snippet:

“Data were prospectively collected over 3 years from physicians participating in an intensive review of an internal medicine course […] The most important features of the effective lecture included clarity and visibility of slides, relevance of material to the audience, and the speaker’s ability to identify key issues, engage the audience, and present material clearly and with animation.”

They go on to prove these top three things are what one can do to optimize recall (ie: keep people interested). “Edutainment” is focused on the second category: engage the audience. I’m not saying that entertainment has no place in professional presentations. I am just trying to point out that it’s only a small part of the overall picture.

Next time you are part of a great presentation, lecture, or talk, take a moment to determine why it’s so engaging. If you don’t have time for that, just watch some TED videos from the web (they are almost all outstanding in every way) and decide what it is that glues you to the screen.

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I’d have to go along with Sean on this. Good presentations are a result of practice, timing, skill, and more practice. Another rule I like is to know your audience. I’ve done a few with a bit of humor to underline a point and make it entertaining. It went over well once, and the next time it was generally labeled ‘unprofessional’. Like a resume’, you want to target a presentation to the audience.

Someone mentioned the ‘Head First’ series as a good example. I’m on my third book, and I find the format more distracting than informative. (The company buys the books for the IT group, so I figure I might as well try to get something out of them.) I am more of a hands-on learner.