How not to Present a Keynote

This year’s keynote was awful.  The way the presenter talked, the disconnect between what he talked about and what most of us are here for, and the use of his PowerPoint slides was just horrendous.  Here’s a mindmap, created by @dwarlick (click on it to open the full image in a new window).

It doesn’t actually seem to me, from viewing this slide, that his actual message is all that bad.  Basically, there are huge problems in the world, and the current world structure can’t solve those problems.  If I had a captive audience of educators, this might be something I’d like to talk about too.  I mean after all, we are going to be educating the future leaders of the world.

The problem was the way he presented it was totally inappropriate.  He used a very poor PowerPoint presentation which he READ from to a room full of people who are easily distracted (because we are teachers) and unimpressed with poor presentation skills.  We know how to captivate audiences, and what he did was anything but captivating.  Here’s a sample slide, so you understand how bad it was (Thanks @web20classroom).

I’d like to say that the response from the audience, while probably accurately describing his presentation, was a bit harsh.  Maybe people on Twitter on the #ISTE10 channel were expressing concern about their own presentations tomorrow.  My recommendation to them, don’t follow #ISTE10 during or shortly after your presentation if you have any self-esteem at all and want to keep it.  I’d love to have seen a few more supportive folks, but the typical crowd mentality of "okay he’s down now let’s jump on him" cropped up yet again and pretty much everyone was negative.  Let’s try and avoid this kind of negativity for each other’s presentations in the next few days, shall we?