Cultural Learnings of TEDx Vienna for Making Glorious Presentations

After having had the opportunity to attend TEDx Vienna, and after watching a lot of TED videos, I decided that an investigation of the style of TED talks and their differences to ordinary talks would be a nice topic for a talk at (as far as I know) continental Europe’s first ScienceBarCamp in Vienna.

The slides

For everyone who was there: here are the slides (PDF)

Since I tried to implement some of the characteristics of a TED talk, the slides were designed to support the talk visually, but do not reflect its contents well. If you’d like to know more about the talk, please leave a comment below or contact me.

I would also like to emphasize the following: this is not a talk on „how to make a good PowerPoint presentation“. First of all, there’s more to a talk than just the set of slides. (Yes, it could have been more aptly named „…for Giving Glorious Talks“.) Also, there are many different ways to give a good talk, but no single one is the ultimate approach for every kind of audience. This is a reflection on TEDs approach. Think about your audience.

By the way, did you get the pop culture reference in its title?

Related links

These are some of the sources used for the talk:

If you’re aiming for the opposite (;-)), have a look at the talk Pepi Zawodsky aka. @maclemon gave at Vienna’s NinjaCon Hacker conference in 2011:  „How To Give a Lousy Presentation“

2 Gedanken zu „Cultural Learnings of TEDx Vienna for Making Glorious Presentations

  • 3. November 2011 um 20:43 Uhr
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    I hope you didn’t mean that you should only think of your audience when you’re doing a TED talk. You have to think about your audience every time (creating a text, any presentation, poster, even a tweet).

    • 3. November 2011 um 20:58 Uhr
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      Of course not 🙂 Thanks for the comment.
      What I meant was the following: An audience of scientists might expect to see a lot of data, an audience of college students in a lecture (ok-that’s technically not a talk) might expect a lot of keywords on the slides if they are to serve as a replacement for real lecture notes. People who know a lot about the subject will like to get precise information on what you’re doing, people who don’t will be more interested in more general aspects of your work.

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