I can't wait to use this exercise in one of my workshops. So much fun and so effective at forcing people to think on their feet -- but in a fun way! Cliff Atkinson's Visual Improv Exercise from Lisa Braithwaite on Vimeo . ...Tags: Tags: Speakers Fun Stuff PresentationCampLA PowerPoin

Exposing ourselves to traditional Japanese aesthetic ideas — notions that may seem quite foreign to most of us — is a good exercise in lateral thinking, a term coined by Edward de Bono in 1967. "Lateral Beginning to think about design by exploring the tenets of the Zen aesthetic may not be an example of Lateral Thinking in the strict sense, but doing so is a good exercise in stretching ourselves and really beginning to think differently about visuals and design in our everyday professional lives. Lateral Thinking is for changing concepts and perception," says de Bono. The principles

You can go to the Blue Zones website to get all the details. Move Naturally (1) You don't need a formal, rigorous exercise plan. We're talking here a change in lifestyle that is fundamentally active. Do exercises/activities that you enjoy. Have Right Outlook (2) Slow down. Happy New Year, everyone. I

Typical activities Ice  breakers; presentation of formal content; software demos (for IT training); group exercises and activities; discussion; formative and summative assessment Unless I’ve missed something important, there seem to be three distinct uses for real-time online commmunications. The following table represents a first attempt at clarifying the discriminating characteristics of these three:  

This activity is even better in a group where people occasionally come together and share their scrapbook contents with others in a kind of “examples of design show and tell.” (2) Keep a digital scrapbook in the form of an online photo blog — either private or open to anyone to view — where you log all the examples of design you find of interest. Playing music is one of those creative “whole mind” activities that will enrich your life (and work). Kaizen (??) means "improvement" — "kai" (?)

In preparation for her talk she asked me if there would be a way to reproduce an exercise called “Speaker & Audience Mapping” that she usually leads in the slideology workshops . The exercise goes like this: the audience picks one of a dozen different audience types (eg. Naturally, we began to use the very same exercise to find a solution for how to teach it. Last month Nancy Duarte spoke at Web2.0 Expo and it was a huge success.

This need not be a full exercise - ad hoc questions serve nicely and save you from needing to script your entire engagement. Assuming your intent is to educate, influence, or motivate, your chance for success will be increased dramatically if you have active, rather than passive, participants. This is a guest post by Roger Courville. You can find out more about Roger in his bio at the end of this post.

Keller suggests the use of sensory stimuli (online that includes the use of sound, animation and webcam video), thought-provoking questions and variability in the use of exercises and media. Confidence: Learners will only start to put energy into an activity if they feel there’s a good chance that this energy will bring reward. You may have come across John Keller’s ARCS model for student motivation. It’s not a model that I’ve used myself, at least not consciously, but I stumbled upon it again recently and thought it provided a good summary of the issues

One side benefit of a bad workshop is if you are actively working with peers you can learn from them and make connections useful for learning later. Your brain has limits on how it digests new information , and if there are not frequent breaks and light activities to give the brain time to recover, less learning occurs in 8 intense hours than might occur in 5 well paced ones. If you don’t break into groups of give exercises, For years I’d heard about Edward Tufte’s famous all day lecture . I’d owned his books, but somehow never made it to the show.

Before you start visualization exercises for your presentations, practice your delivery and know your material. As soon as you know your material — but not too well — do the following activities to start your visualization process. I’ve repeatedly read about visualization and its effectiveness in helping presenters get ready for a presentation. This tool calms the nerves of those who fear giving presentations.