 Connecting with your audience in a virtual environment is a completely different challenge than engaging in the same room. Your attendees will be tempted by other browser windows or desktop tasks, and the same visual cues that you rely on in a face-to-face environment will be hidden. That's why your voice, your visuals, and the way that you choose to engage your attendees will be all the more important. In this screencast, we'll take a quick peek at a handful of EDUCAUSE presentations that exemplify great strategies for presenting online. Voice is often overlooked when planning your presentation, but in a virtual interface, your voice becomes the conduit for all the facial expressions or hand gestures you might make face-to-face. Remember, much of your interface may be stationary. It's your voice that will draw them in and keep them connected. Next, we'll hear two speakers. In the first, Nabil Ahmad's featured session from the ELI Focus session, notice the conversational tone. In the second, Lawrence Lessig's general session from the EDUCAUSE annual conference, notice how the range, inflection, and energy in his voice keeps you engaged. Before we go too deep, because this is more of a general session, what I want to talk about is the long tail of mobile devices. So for those of you who you may have heard of, at least for those of us in the United States and probably North America, you know of companies like Amazon and Netflix, and they have this business model called the long tail. Basically what it means, if we look at Amazon, is that they get about 20% of their overall sales from the best-selling books. But the other 80% comes from just selling one of everything. Think about this idea of a paradigm case. So Constitution of the United States, Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, this is the Fourth Amendment, actually it looks a little bit like that. The Fourth Amendment protecting people against unreasonable searches and seizures. The paradigm case that that amendment had in its head was something like this. The search warrant to permit authorities to enter into a building and search for evidence of a crime. Trust pass was at the core of the protections that it granted. The framers of the Fourth Amendment didn't much think about a technology like wiretapping, because of course when you wiretap, you don't necessarily have to trust pass on anybody's property in order to effect the search that a wiretap makes possible. It's outside the scope of the paradigm case. Or think about Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11. You might of course know that to be the War Powers Clause that grants Congress the power to declare war. A lot of presidents have missed that first word in that sentence. Congress that has that power, we put that aside. The paradigm case that the framers were thinking about then was this, right? This kind of war, a people physically gathering in order to engage in a confrontation between two states. They didn't much think about this man. They didn't think about the dynamic of war that would be presented when wars... Notice that during Lessick's presentation, it's not just his voice that keeps you engaged. The slides move quickly, drawing your eye to rapid new content. In an online environment, your slides and media become the focal point of your presentation. Plan them carefully and plan to move them quickly. And these slides, presented by Kyle Dickinson and Bill Rankin at the 2010 ELI Spring Focus Session. Notice the emphasis on images and design rather than text and bullets. Use your own slides to show, not tell. In this ELI Web Seminar presentation from Michelle Pekansky-Brock, note the use of screenshots rather than text to demonstrate functionality. And rather than talk about results, she shows them using graphs and charts. Build your own slides to support your presentation, not mimic it. If it's true, as John Medina suggests, that we digest content in 10-minute segments, you'll want to break up your presentation into chunks by incorporating interactive elements such as polls, chat questions, or discussion. In an online environment, that 10-minute segment is even shorter. Break frequently to take the temperature of the room and invite attendees into the conversation. We'll now look at two presentations. In the first, Doug Duncan quizzes his audience as a way to demonstrate his topic, clickers in the classroom. Then we'll hear from Gail Matthews Denitali and Barbara Droud during their ELI Web Seminar where they use photos, polls, and a chat prompt to set the context for their talk about the role of play in teaching and learning the technology. Now, 15 minutes later, in the same lecture where he taught this, he asked his students, what do they hear when a violin is played? Is it A, mostly the strings, B, mostly the wood, C, both equally, or D, none of the above? Now, just for fun, I'm going to take a poll of you, and I believe Veronica is going to help me by... Oh, she's already put up the poll. So my question for you is, what fraction of Carl Weiman's students gave the correct answer? Is it A, 0%, is it 10%, is it 30%, is it 70%, is it 90%, okay? Remember, it's in the same class that he gave the explanation, and he gives clear explanations. 15 minutes later, he stopped to see whether they got it. Now, I hope that not too many of you have looked ahead in the slides because, in fact, don't look ahead. The next slide gives the correct answer. Okay, as I would do in using clickers, I'll warn all of you, a majority of people have clicked in, so I'll give you five seconds. If you haven't selected an answer, please select your answer now. Two seconds. Okay, and we'll stop the poll, and I see that we're fairly evenly divided. The most common answer is 30%, but we have a slight excess of pessimists over optimists, or maybe they're not pessimists. Maybe you just read ahead because, in fact, only 10% gave the correct answer. Take a few minutes. Tell us a little bit about what you played with. What did you grab? Okay, so if everybody's had a chance to vote, we'll see that we've got a lot of Etch-a-Sketch fans, and I count myself among them, but there's a pretty even distribution across this range of materials. I'd like to sort of say that that probably tells us a lot about the range and the diversity that we all bring to the table in terms of our play behaviors. Let me just comment a little bit. If you just grab these play objects out of the air, we've thought about a range of things. Let me just mention a little bit about, we've got, say, for example, the puzzle is an example of a form of play that has a right answer. The enjoyment comes from resting coherence and order out of apparent chaos. When we talk of play, the first thing that usually comes to mind are games that have a solution. So this is really only one subset of a much larger set of play possibilities. These are just a few tips to help you plan your next virtual presentation. The best advice, perhaps, is just to relax, practice, and continue to learn, grow, and refine your skills. For more tips, please visit the Etch-a-Cos Speaker Resource...