We introduce Learning Presentation design principles that incorporate theories of Adult Learning. These presentation principles and approaches can be adapted by researchers, teachers, and students for use in classrooms, conferences, and communities, whether F2F, hybrid, or online environments. We collaborate with participants by sharing knowledge and experience to create personalized strategies for maximizing learning while using presentation platforms. For this showcase we draw on our work with future faculty and current staff to demonstrate Learning Presentations as scaffolds for showcasing ideas, guiding learning, and engaging learners. Ilene D. Alexander Christina I. Petersen

1. Garr Reynolds in Presentation Zen:
The facts used to be difficult to access. Not anymore.
Good stories have interesting, clear beginnings, provocative, engaging content in the middle,
and a clear conclusion.
What Garr Reynolds doesn t say – in fact few writing about presentations say this – is
anything about learning presentations – where learning processes involving social and
personal, reflective and critical processing of information and learning as creation of new
knowledge in the actions of examining ideas gained from listening, observing, reading,
experiencing and testing.
Where a presentation presents information, a learning presentation provides a structure that
draws together ideas and images to provoke learning as the learning presentation, learners
and presenters interact. A learning presentation considers what audience members already
know, why they need/want to think about whatever it is that s at the heart of the presentation,
what ideas and information will provoke next stages of learning necessary for growth of
insight, development of skills, problem solving of a proximate concern.
Learning Presentations draw on what audience members have already read/done to prepare
for the session; provide a framework for thinking through ideas and images and pauses for
talking/thinking so audience members connect with a core ideas; expect that learners will
need/want to take next or new steps as part of the follow up to a learning presentation.
Photo: Blackboard with the question What is your dream job? at the Oxford and Grand
Caribou on the day I assembled the slide shell of images for this presentation.

2. A learning presentation doesn t try to be everything – the textbook, the discussion linking the
textbook to life and / or scholarly literature, and the road map through a thinking process.
That s a presentation – a format that often aims to merge together the text/documentation to
convey facts with slides that blend in new questions and bits of information.
Garr Reynolds calls this Slideumentation – others have called it death (of creative
collaboration and independent thinking) by powerpoint.
As my Grandfather might say Sure, you can kill two birds with one stone. But do you
really want dead birds?
Photo: Claude Pratt Alexander and granddaughter sitting on the bench outside the back door
of 131 Morgan Street in Tracy, Minnesota. 1961.

3. Nope on the dead birds – but yes to learning presentation, where the two things we get with a single
presentation might well be words and images creating a memorable intersection:
We might get to listen to an intelligent and evocative—perhaps at times even provocative—human being
who teaches us, or inspires us, or who stimulates us with knowledge plus meaning, context, and emotion
in a way that is memorable (Garr Reynolds).
Likewise, the first step to creating and designing great presentations is to be mindful of the current state
of what passes for normal PowerPoint presentations and that what is normal today is out of sync and
off-kilter with how people actually learn and communicate (Garr Reynolds).
I want presentations that are built for learning – scaffolded by considerations about learning, design and
story that shape deliberate decision-making in light of audience, message and learning goals. I want
presentations where words and ideas, images and insights, cognitive and affective, slides and handouts
intersect meaningfully – not where these die as words pose as images and collide for our attention.
As Peter Elbow says in On Writing about engaging processes of drafting – the act of beginning to
write before you re fully ready – and revision:
“Another reason for starting writing and keeping writing: If you stop too much and worry and correct and
edit, you ll invest yourself too much in these words on the page. You ll care too much about them; you ll
make some phrases you really love; you won t be able to throw them away. But you should throw lots
away because by the end you ll have a different focus or angle on what you are writing, if not a whole new
subject. To keep these earlier words would ruin your final product. It s like scaffolding. There is no
shortcut by which you can avoid building it, even though it can t be part of your final building” (30).
Photo: Lowry Theatre staircase with its scaffolding not showing, and its bold, evocative colors shining in
front Salford, UK.

4. Principle 1 - Learning - Consider the ways in which your audience members might best
learn.
I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can
learn. Albert Einstein.
A classroom characterized as persons connected in a net of relationships with
people who care about each other's learning as well as their own is very different
from a classroom that is seen as comprised of teacher and students. Carolyn
Shrewsbury.
Learning refers only to significant changes in capability, understanding,
knowledge, practices, attitudes or values by individuals, groups, organisations
or society. Frank Coffield.
Photo: Bath Botanical Gardens. December 2010.

5. Principle 2 - Design - Begin with design, then continue to incorporate design as content.
Innovation doesn t just happen at your desk.
It happens in the weirdest places and times.
You get ideas through watching the world, and through relationships. You get ideas from looking down the road. You have to be
available to adapt on the fly. In real innovation, being comfortable isn t good.
I don t want to be comfortable. I always want to be on edge, because that edge gives you energy and excitement.
What s new? What s next? That s how you stay ahead.
Terry Tietzen, founder and C.E.O. of Edatanetworks, a developer of customer loyalty software
NYTimes 25 March 2012, Business Day page 2
Garr Reynolds on Why Design Matters
Design begins with people and initially happens away from the computer and presentation software
http://www.garrreynolds.com/Design/basics.html
To me, design is about humans creating great works that help or improve the lives of other humans, often in profound ways, and often
in ways that are quite small and go unnoticed. When we design, we need to be concerned with how other people will interpret our
design message…. Designers need to be aware, then, of the end user. If no one can (or wants to) benefit from our design - no matter
how compelling or beautiful or cool - then what good is it? …[G]ood design must necessarily, in my opinion, have an impact on
people's lives, no matter how seemingly small. Good design changes things.
Seven basic graphic design principles – Garr Reynolds citing Alexander White
http://www.garrreynolds.com/Design/basics.html
Unity – of concept
Gestalt – overall design
Space – the space you DON T use can clarify concepts
Color – conscious use for emphasis, hierarchy, dominance, and balance
Dominance - strong and clear focal point with clear contrast among elements
Hierarchy - clear starting point with elements to guide viewer through the design
Balance – elements work in symmetrical, asymmetrical, or mosaic modes
Garr Reynolds on working away from the computer:
• Before you design your presentation, you need to see the big picture and identify your core messages—or the single core message.
• a cognitive style to PowerPoint that leads to an oversimplification of our content and obfuscation of our message.
• professional designers—even young new media designers who ve grown up on computers—usually do much of their planning and

6. Principle 3 - Story - Use story to provide context and organize your facts.
Stories are effective teaching tools. They show how context can mislead people to
make wrong decisions. Stories illustrate causal relationships that people hadn t
recognized before and highlight the unexpected, resourceful ways in which people
have solved problems.
Dan & Chip Heath, Made to Stick
When we teach we tell stories about the world. Some are scientific, some historical,
some philosophical, and so on.
Jo Ann Pagano, Moral Fictions in The Stories Lives Tell: Using Narrative in
Education
Photo – Taken in September 2009 the very day I decided I could make presentation
software like PowerPoint work for me if I took my own photos for classroom and
professional use and made use of the typesetting and newspaper production &
design skills that had paid my way through undergraduate school. I found this
photo on that first walk with camera in hand, moving from the conference dorm to
the Cornerhouse on what was my first of now five longish to long stays in
Manchester/Salford.

7. A scallywag, historically, breaks with prevailing, coercive norms and faces
sanctions
Noun informal
1. a person, typically a child, who behaves badly but in an amusingly mischievous
rather than harmful way; a rascal: that scallywag of a son of yours
• US a white Southerner who collaborated with northern Republicans during the post-
Civil War reconstruction period.
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/scallywag
A scallywag, in our use, who makes use of Learning Presentations, may– in his or her
work within academic settings –find s/he gains approbations for using Learning
Presentation Principles and Frameworks to break with presentation norms that that
stifle creativity and/or prevailing power point practices that disrupt, dominate or
trivialize content through slideumentary means and modes
creativity - that process of having original ideas that have value (Ken Robinson)
that is, an imaginative activity that seeks out original and assesses value.
All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education
National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education
1999
things you ll get called for changing the rules (dissonance too part of learning;
Brookfield on feeling a traitor and real costs)
Photo: Ornamental Fountain in Williamson Square, home also to the Playhouse Theatre
in Liverpool.

8. We want learners to move with heads up, to identify what s new, what s newly in sight, what s taking
shape, what s challenging their brains to workout new configurations for information becoming part of /
dropping away from ideas and concepts; we want them to notice variations - colors and shapes, move
toward something new with tentative - and at times bold - graces.
Connecting requires depths of learning - visual and verbal, oral and aural, written and spoken - across
processing modes that James Zull notes as Four Pillars of the brain: collecting data, reflecting (on what s
been gathered anew alongside what s been gathered before), creating, and testing.
Connecting requires
• entertaining new ideas / novel combinations - play
• making sense of sensations, sensual data, positive/negative connotations, flight and fight responses,
human dimensions of ideas / issues and human connections to the act of studying itself - feeling
• proposing and/or discerning a theme, as in literature, that s built from the interplay of select base
elements - developing meaning
Elements of literature
www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Melinda_Kreth/Elements%2520of%2520Literature.pdf
• Plot (i.e., What happens in the story?)
• Scene or Setting (i.e., Where, when, and in what environment(s) does the action take place?)
• Characters (i.e., What people or beings are in the story?)
• Style [or Mood or Tone] (i.e., What is the size of the vocabulary, the complexity of the story and sentence
structure, and the treatment of the story s telling: comic, serious, tragic, morbid, etc.? This is often a
most difficult characteristic to pin down.)
• Theme(s) [or Messages] (Idea(s), cosmologies, theologies, philosophies, religions, statements, theories of
nature, moral(s), etc.)
The five elements of literature discussed above are never mutually exclusive. One element is not really
intelligible without most or all of the others well understood, so don t get discouraged when, just as you
think you have something nicely explained for a piece you re reading, you think of something additional
or even contrary that makes your explanation inadequate. The best we can probably expect is that these
explanations make temporarily intelligible the fictional universe we ve visited and are trying to tell
someone about.
Photo: Grandbaby learning to hold up her head.

9. Principle 4 - Play - Laughing people are more creative people.
Daniel Pink – in a conceptual age, work is not just about seriousness
but about play as well. Such an age requires high-touch and high-
concept aptitudes equally. Synthesis and ability to use seemingly
unrelated pieces to form and articulate the big picture before us is
crucial, even a differentiator (Reynolds on Pink s ideas)
Madan Kataria - Laughing people are more creative people. They are
more productive people. location 291 in Presentation Zen, Kindle
edition.
Photo: Piccadilly Gardens fountain one very hot July 2011 day.
Manchester.

10. Principle 5 - Feeling - Invoke emotion and invite audience members to connect
thinking and feeling responses, cognitive and affective learning.
Bridging Emotion and Intellect / Jane Fried. College Teaching: Fall 1993.
The work of a teacher involves
(1) development of critical thinking skills, so that students understand how to organize
data, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, and draw conclusions;
(2) recognition of meaning attribution and the power that emotions, values, and
personal experience have in shaping one's interpretation of information.
The professor, therefore, becomes responsible for teaching students three sets of skills:
• first is separating facts from cultural assumptions & beliefs about those facts
• second is teaching students how to shift perspective.
• third is perhaps the most difficult to learn, that of differentiating between
personal discomfort and intellectual disagreement.
Observe/Describe
Reflect/Interpret
Expand/Extend
Seth Godin says presentation is about the transfer of emotion location 342
Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them
understand why you re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever location 349
Often, people gain a feeling for or about your presentation, or come to a conclusion
about your presentation by the time you re on the second slide. location 353
Photo: 'Girl' by Robert Thomas, in Gorsedd Gardens in front of Cardiff City Hall. 2008.

11. Principle 6 - Meaning - Convey core idea / central concern, even passion in your
presentation: use this opportunity to make a small difference in the world.
in considering audience, message and learning goals, those who shape and share
presentations have an opportunity to make a small difference in the world
location 298
in making presentations, draw on other forms of visual <--> verbal communication
location 324:
documentary photography and fiction
artistic and advertising imagery
documentary films, ranging from Ken Burns work to the 2012 documentary short
subject, Saving Face: http://oscar.go.com/nominees/documentary-short-subject/
saving-face
comics and graphic novels
partnering text and images that together form a powerful narrative which is
engaging and memorable - Cabinets of Curiosities
Garr Reynolds exhortation: stop letting our history and conditioning about what we
know (or thought we knew) inhibit our being open to other ways of presentation.
location 335
In short, Learning Presentations is about remov[ing] walls and connect[ing] with an
audience to inform or persuade in a very meaningful, unique moment in time
Photo: Window poster at the recently closed Blackwell Bookstore at the University of
Salford. July 2011.

12. Principle 7 - Symphony - Integrate all elements of your presentation to shape the big picture. Seek
ways to illuminate logic, analysis, and intuition as part of setting out idea or topic. Design to
acknowledge audience members thinking and feeling responses / cognitive and affective learning
modes.
Anyone can deliver chunks of information and repeat findings represented visually in bullet
points on a screen, but what s needed are those who can recognize the patterns, and who are
skilled at seeing nuances and the simplicity that may exist in a complex problem.
Symphony is about utilizing our whole mind – logic, analysis, intuition – to make sense of our
world (ie our topic), find the big picture, and determine what is important and what is not
before the day of our talk. It s also about deciding what matters and letting go of the rest.
truly seeing in a new way
Whole mind / Whole person
HIgh concept / High touch
Cathy Davidson would say of this conceptual age that learning requires the depth and breadth
of symphony: mindfully multi-tasking, purposeful uses of multiple technologies, approaches
to learning and to problem solving by attending to the layers
Note: We've called this integration elsewhere, thinking about interdisciplinary studies meeting
reflection learning and perspective taking as integral to discussion.
Reynolds draws on Daniel Pink to call this see the relationships between relationships.
location 274
Photo: View from top of Dina Bran outside Llangollen, Wales. Fall 2010.

13. At the root of connecting - prioritizing, finding the tap root that will
sustain the entire structure. Connecting roots. Connecting from the
roots.
We need to not leave [people in] the world split at the root.
Photo: Bath Botanical Gardens. December 2010.

14. extend - what it means to learn, the means to learning, the practices of sharing
ideas in format and substance
extending credit - Acknowledge
extending use for a new welcome - Ownership
extending thinking and thinking resources - Openness
verb
1. cause to cover a wider area; make larger
• cause to last longer: they asked the government to extend its period of deliberation"
• straighten or spread out at full length"
• spread from a central point to cover a wider area"
• occupy a specified area"
• (extend to) be applicable to"
"
2. hold (something) out towards someone!
• offer or make available"
"
3. cause (someone or something) to exert the utmost effort: extend oneself to utmost!
Photo: Student depiction of learning for Fall2011 GRAD 8101: Teaching in Higher
Education course.

15. Principle 8 - Acknowledge - Acknowledge the origins of your presentation elements, contributors of ideas and images, and the
role of audience members as co-creators of meaning as you interact with them. Acknowledge the presentation itself is not the
main learning tool.
In this conceptual age, we need to acknowledge that learning is constructivist, collaborative, and mediated as well as
distributed via technology.
On a more local, personal, collegial level we need to share, give away, make it easy to find the resources we create -
using various social media platforms to post learning, knowledge, developed and developing ideas as part of open
access of peer review and open resource approach of publicly-based scholarship - the more people who know your
idea, the more powerful it becomes
Constructivism: is the theory that humans generate knowledge and meaning from an interaction between their
experiences and their ideas. The Constructivist (e.g. Dewey[1] [2]; Montessori[3]; Kolb[4] [5]) learning process is
experiential learning through real life experience to construct and conditionalize knowledge. The type of learning is
problem based adaptive learning that challenges faulty schema, integrates new knowledge with existing knowledge,
and allows for creation of original work or innovative procedures. The type of learner is self-directed, creative, and
innovative. The purpose in education is to become creative and innovative through analysis, conceptualizations, and
synthesis of prior experience to create new knowledge. The educator s role is to mentor the learner during heuristic
problem solving of ill-defined problems by enabling quested learning that may modify existing knowledge and allow
for creation of new knowledge. The learning goal is the highest order of learning: heuristic problem solving,
metacognitive knowledge, creativity, and originality. http://en.wikip
edia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28learning_theory%29
Collaboration: Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more
people or organizations work together to realize shared goals, (this is more than the intersection of common goals
seen in co-operative ventures, but a deep, collective, determination to reach an identical objective[by whom?][original
research?]) — for example, an intriguing[improper synthesis?] endeavor that is creative in nature—by
sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of
leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group. In particular, teams that work collaborativ
ely can obtain greater resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources. Colla
boration is also present in opposing goals exhibiting the notion of adversarial collaboration, though this is not a
common case for using the word. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration
Photo: Paul Haywood s right hand. Education in a Changing Environment Conference Dinner. July 2011.

16. Principle 9 - Ownership - Own your presentation approach: don t
be owned by the presentation software or what prevails as a
normal presentation. Own what will evoke and support learning.
Photo: Walking into Salford from Manchester along the Victoria
Bridge. August 2010.

17. Principle 10 - Openness - Remain open to change, and remain
committed to sharing what you create as an open educational
resource.
Photo: Liverpool s Crosby beach installation of Antony Gormley
sculpture Another Place, and installation of 100 cast iron figures along
2 miles.

18. At the heart of it: This is the route we re asking you to take. Learning
Presentations take a new route, and new Learning Presentations take
us on new routes.
Photo: Construction near Piccadilly Train Station. Manchester.
January 2012.

19. Normal, it changes. And the best intentions that launched the old
normal remain at play when we look at learning with new eyes -
determining what stays the course with us and what changes in
making a new that is of use for the audiences, messages, and learning
needs of the here and now into the future.
Photo: Victoria Gallery and Museum, University of Liverpool. A
preserved lecture hall in the original red brick university building,
noted as From 1892 onwards...the heart of University life; besides
administration offices it housed lecture rooms, staff offices, common
rooms and the Tate Library, which was designed to hold 80,000
volumes. January 2011.

20. Photo: Tin of sharpened colored pencils atop a black chair at the Craft
Centre. Manchester. January 2012.