I started by writing some details about the talk along the top of the page: where it is and who's attending. Then I drew two stick figures: one for people going into the talk, and one for people going out of the talk.

I focused on the people going out of the talk. What did I want them to be able to do? What did I want them to understand? What did I want them to feel?

After I sketched the outcome, I went to the beginning. What would people be thinking, going in? What would be their experiences and assumptions?

Then I drew an arrow from the person going in to the person going out. Somehow, my presentation would need to help people get from point A to point B.

I added lots of arrows feeding into that main arrow. Which stories could help people move towards the outcome? I listed as many stories as I could.

Then I started mindmapping the presentation so that I could group similar elements and flesh things out in more detail. I wrote my key message on the right side. Then I broke it down into parts, which I refined further. I cross-referenced it against the first page to see if I had any other stories that fit in nicely, and to make sure that all the parts I wanted to include were related to the arrow between point A and point B.

And then it was storyboard time! =D I didn't have any storyboard templates lying around (maybe I should print some!), so I used graphing paper instead. I could've used my Cintiq for this and the previous steps, but graphing paper had been more convenient when I started, and it didn't cost me that much more time. =)

It was strange making a storyboard for the presentation. I'd hear snippets of the presentation in my head - sudden snatches of potential transitions and ways to illustrate topics. I started from the first slide and followed the images as they flowed. There are better ways to illustrate these things, I'm sure, but this was a good start! =)

After I created the storyboard, I opened up Inkscape and brought out my Cintiq tablet. I made a grid of 800 pixel by 600 pixel rectangles, 5 rectangles across and 9 rectangles down. I set the rectangle fills to black and my pencil color to white, and then I started drawing. I occasionally cleaned things up with the node tool and the delete button, both mapped to shortcut keys on my tablet.

A couple of hours later, it was done.

Then I needed to figure out how to get it into a presentation. I didn't want to export each frame, because it was hard to keep things in sequence and inconvenient to rearrange slides in the presentation software. Instead, I exported the entire thing as a large image. I used ImageMagick (convert -crop 800×600 slides.png slide_%d.png) to slice the image into tiles, and the OpenOffice.org Photo Album extension to import all of the slides. Bonus: they imported in sequence!

I saved the slides as ODP and PPT, and exported the slides as PDF. Et voila:

The slides don't make sense without me, but that's okay. =) I may make a standalone version if it works out.

This was fun. It took me a while to figure it out, though. The presentation hinges on two pairs of pairs: the first set is new media = social media and new generation = net generation, and the second set is the 2×2 matrix. I only came across that while ironing handkerchiefs and playing with my speech topic out loud. Once that pattern floated up, everything else fell into place.

Part of the fun of making presentations is figuring out a natural pattern for the topic… =)

Technorati Tags: enterprise2.0, presentation, sketches, slideshare, speech, talk, web2.0

I tried this before with a voice recorder. I never found the time to listen to myself again, trying to pick out my words against the background of subway announcements and crowd chatter. Somehow, working with the computer changes things. Dragon NaturallySpeaking skips over my silences, successfully transcribes many of the words even in a rapid-fire brain dump, and breaks apart the phases of seeking out what I want to say, figuring out how to say it, and editing it into something that makes sense.

I don't use it all the time. I'm a little self-conscious about talking to my computer when there's somebody else in the room. (At this,  W- smiles at me.) I still carry a portable voice recorder, but because my recorder doesn't do any noise cancellation, I find the easiest way is to re-dictate the interesting parts. But I appreciate the freedom that dictation gives me. I don't know if I work any faster or slower with it, but I do know that I work differently. And if it lets me reach different ideas, then it'll be well worth it.

My accent grows thicker the longer I stay here—or is it just that I notice it more? I pause more, gesture more, stumble over words more than I remember doing. And yes, from time to time, I say things that people don't understand until I repeat myself or spell things out. It distracts them from what I'm trying to say. (Although it does show that they're paying attention! =) )

One way to deal with this is to learn the phonetic alphabet and read the dictionary. Computer-based dictionaries tend to not have pronunciation guides. Web-based ones don't let me flip through them for random words, although I think I should scale back on that a bit and focus more on great combinations of words. I sound too bookish already.

The best thing to do, I suppose, is to listen. I need to listen to more things. I need to listen to people with wide vocabularies and well-expressed thoughts. I really should format that iPod or do some other magic so that I can connect it to my laptop and make the most of it.

I need to be exposed to the sound of other people's voices. My media diet is almost entirely print and web. I don't watch television, and I hardly listen to the radio. I should fix that at least with audiobooks and podcasts.

And maybe I can pay more attention to the experience created by sound... It takes a certain skill to form sentences that sound good. I should learn that. It'll be fun. =) Right, there's something I need to work on.

On Technorati: communication, speech, speaking

I'm doing "Evaluate to Motivate" next week. I have plenty of stories to tell them about my family and my friends! =)

On Technorati: toastmasters, speech

(PDF, OpenOffice.org 2.0)

On Technorati: presentation, talks, speech