INSPIRE, CONNECT, PERSUADE: MIX TECHNOLOGY AND ART IN TEACHING PRESENTATION SKILLS

Abstract

Do what you love. Inspire your audience. Have fun. These are some of the secrets behind the power and the success of Steve Jobs's presentations. As Communication Coach Carmine Gallo points out, while most presenters simply convey information, Jobs inspires; his presentations inform, engage, astound and electrify the audiences. My paper, too, was inspired by Steve Jobs, one of the most extraordinary speakers of our time, as were my EFL seminars and my students (Business and Engineering majors) when watching his videotaped 2007 speech unveiling the iPhone and his famous, memorable Commencement Speech at Stanford in 2005 (one of the greatest reflections on life we have ever heard). Using Steve Jobs's 2007 iPhone launch as a case study, the present paper proposes a humanistic approach of the technology-enhanced teaching of presentation skills, a more humanistic philosophy of teaching in general. Steve Jobs himself strongly believed that the best ideas emerge from the intersection of technology and the humanities. In fact, in today's postmodern world, the boundaries between technology and art are no longer clearly defined. In other words I will show that technology allows a humanistic approach to teaching and that the success of a presentation resides first of all in the human element. It is the passion of the teacher/speaker about the subject, their own personality and naturalness infused into the presentation that inspires the audience. It is the presenter's capacity to make it simple for the audience and to give them a show instead of simply delivering information that engages the audience. Moreover, inspiring presenters like Steve Jobs do not sell a product; they sell an experience, something to enrich people's life. All these are ways of emotionally connecting with the audience; winning the audience over ensures the success of the presentation. Multimedia and Internet technologies allow the teacher to present more information more effectively; students can see and hear things, events, demonstrations, etc. that otherwise would only have been described or explained in a lecture or textbook. However, as shown above, good teaching involves much more than the simple transfer of material or specific skills. In teaching, the major challenge is to convey excitement, to incite curiosity and to provide the students with the psychological incentives they need to work hard. The paper also highlights another significant aspect, namely the analogy between Steve Jobs's technology-aided presentations, building up to a memorable moment, and the art of story-telling. Like Steve Jobs who treats every slide as if it were a piece of poetry, American writer and graphic designer Nancy Duarte knows that it is not about the slides, but about the power of the story. In her book Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences (2010), Duarte assimilates the presentation with a screenplay, using tension, conflict and resolution to connect with the audience, creating, like Steve Jobs, what she calls a STAR moment: "Something They'll Always Remember".