Course: A Cash Management course
Date: 19 Oct 2007
Location: A good sunny autumn day in Hong Kong, China
# of Participants: 28
I am feeling: Tired but Good
It is an interesting experience this morning. The projector did not work when I examined it before the class started. It still did not work after repeated ‘rescue’ attempt. There was only 10 more minutes before the class started and the participants were down-stair already. They are external participants, not internal ones. And this is a technical knowledge training i.e. lot of hard content instead of a soft-skills one with lot of experimental activities. What would you do?
I chose to do my training without projector instead of delaying the start or finding another room. I was glad that I was quite calm about this. This may be because I have been more and more suspecting about whether visual ‘aids’ the delivery. See my upcoming post ‘Blocking the Projector’ for more of my thoughts on this. In addition, I am the one who developed the course content, and thus I know the content and flow well.
The no-projector delivery went very well. I was so satisfied that I almost decided not to use the projector even though it was fixed after the first break!! This experience strengthens my thought of avoiding reliance on projector / PPT:
It will disappoint you some day (...well.. Murphy Law..)
Audience hates PPT more and more these days
PPT is more a speaking note than visual aid these days. Using it will just lower your creditability since you speak only after looking at what is on the slide. (Yet, it is a good safety net if you really do not have time to prepare)