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