Powerpoint Karaoke is about presenting slides you have never seen, and possibly make no sense.
I’d always wanted to host a Powerpoint Karaoke and I did that with HCII’s Ubicomp+Assist Group in our retreat. Here’s one of us’s presentation:
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Dan did a very good job in that he held up to his story regardless of what’s on the slides. And somehow he managed to get through that story with those slides. I bet someone uninformed wouldn’t expect that he hadn’t seen the slides at all when he presented them.
So here’s Lesson Zero: You Gotta Have Your Own Story; Don’t Be Led By The Slides.
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Here’s how we ran the Powerpoint Karaoke. We asked each participant to make a 10-slide powerpoint. We shuffled them. And before the Karaoke started each participant contributed a random topic, e.g., “Global Warming And Its Effect On You”. We shuffled the topics. Then each participant had to present a random slidedeck talking about a random topic.
To encourage the other presenters, I volunteered to present the first powerpoint. Here are the lessons I learnt:
Lesson One: Make It Interactive. There were a lot of times I almost got stuck. And I figured out that I could just let the audience speak, e.g., asking a question and patiently waiting for some answers. I asked a lot of questions during the presentation and to my surprise I found they were well-received by the audience.
Lesson Two: Know Where You Are. To me the most ordeal part is that the merely ten slides felt like a hundred. At some point I felt desperate seeing yet another near-random slide coming up. God, how many left… It’s surprisingly impossible to count within ten slides to keep you aware where you are.
Lesson Three: Good Slides Matter. Some slides were deliberately made hard to read (e.g., with lots of text, diagrams, etc.). I had to think aloud and walk through these kinds of slides together with the audience, which dawned on me that how outrageous it would be once I become the one that make the slides incomprehensible; and indeed, often we do that.
Lesson Four: Why You Should Do Powerpoint Karaoke: Cuz It Makes You Realize That Nothing Else Is Worse. The moment I finished my slides I felt like I was almost ready to give a keynote. This was the worst. Nothing else is harder. Consider a normal conference presentation where you make the slides and you got to practice them over and over again. There’s no reason you can’t do a much better job.
I will probably be holding another Powerpoint Karaoke again. Let me know if you want to participate!