STRIVE APR - JUN 2018 | Page 30

Lessons from the experts If you are trying to fine-tune your ability to share knowledge, there are several key experts from which I have gained great insight. Dr. Carmen Simon (@areyoumemorable) cognitive scientist, keynote speaker and founder of Memzy, for example, has spent the last decade helping people apply research-based guidelines to craft their messages and pre- sentations. She leverages brain science to make presentation slides more memorable. Two more favorites of mine are Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. They have spent years trying to uncover why some stories are memorable and others are not (think, for example, of the sticky story of the razor found in a child’s Halloween apple). In their book they explore common elements of “sticky” stories. For those of you who present webinars or have your content recorded for later consumption, there is mounting insight that can help you improve your presentations as well. For instance, edX (a popular MOOC platform founded by Harvard University and MIT) conducted a large-scale study involving more than 6.9 million video watching sessions. Their findings are summarized in a report entitled How Video Production Affects Student Engagement: An Empirical Study of MOOC Videos, http://bit.ly/studyMOOCvideos. Another example comes from researchers Logan Fiorella and Richard Mayer, who noted the differences in observers’ knowledge transfer when varying how images were drawn or represented. They studied the varying degrees of effectiveness in viewing an instructor’s entire body while they were draw- ing, just viewing their hand, o