A few months ago I was invited by the guru of Emergency Medicine edumucation – Mel Herbert MD – to present at Essentials of Emergency Medicine 2011 in San Francisco.

However the initial warm glow of honour at being an invited to speak has now been replaced with the blind panic of actually deciding what to speak about…

In light of the fact that I write a blog, and am preparing three talks on social media in medical education, I felt it pertinent that I should share some of this journey with you – well the mildly interesting bits anyway!

I am currently fluctuating between stages 5, 6 and 7 of the lecture preparation process…

The 11 phases of grief  presentation preparation

1. Acquiescence – blind acceptance of speaking invitation
2. Denial – after all, 3 months…seems a very long time
3. Ignorance – blissful and protracted, there is always tomorrow
4. Realisation - 10 days…seems an awfully short amount of time
5. Panic
6. Conceptualisation – defining what to write about
7. Conversion – analog to digital metamorphosis
8. Visualisation – cerebral rehearsal
9. Presentation – there is no tomorrow
10. Beer
11. Evaluation – next time I will do things differently!

Stage 7: Analog to Digital metamorphosis

Hopefully the labile fluctuations will subside and I will be able to present some form of coherent description of stages 7 and 8 later in the week!

As long as I don’t get too distracted with my new toy from FreelandStudios – the awesome iRetrofone that is!

Stage 6.5: Technological deviation (work avoidance tactics)

Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency Medicine education blog

I have had to write a lot of presentations recently.

One of my major problems with lecturing is not creating the content for the presentation, but taming the medium designed to assist me in my quest to impart knowledge.

One of my biggest faults has being trying to translate the swirling mass of disorganised data in my mind into meaningful, didactic and provoking slides. Designing a non-distracting framework that acts as a virtual mud-map whilst retaining the visual attention of the audience without undue distraction and which can be interpreted without audio… has been challenging

Researching the methodology behind some of the great presenters of visual information led me back to the great 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint by Guy Kawasaki

To prevent an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

This minimalist approach has been taken to the next level by BrainSlides.com with some stimulating advice on presentation design for educators.  In particular a recent post “Doctors Orders – Burn your powerpoint presentations” inspired by the Brain Rules of John Medina produced this evocative presentation

Hopefully this will help trim my 120 slides/30minute talk ratio in the near future!

Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency Medicine education blog

Introducing a new website ‘Medical Update‘ designed to provide Australian medical practitioners with free virtual access to educational conferences and meetings has launched. Medical Update Pty Ltd director Gary Smith said video and power point slides from events from around the country are uploaded on to the site – MedicalUpdate.com.au – where they are easily accessible by subscribers.

Medical Update films educational meetings and conferences that doctors would normally attend and then place the visual learning material up on line. The site has been live since October and currently includes presentations from local and international clinicians covering a variety of topics including eating disorders, cardiology and ophthalmology.

The service should be an innovative and time-saving eLearning portal for clinicians, and is provided free to Australian medical practitioners who register online.

The website allows them to watch video of the conferences and meetings online at home or work, instead of spending hours at a meeting. We travel the country searching for the best presenters on the most interesting topics. We record the events (including PowerPoint slides) and make them available free of charge so you can watch them when it’s convenient for you. You get to stay up to date, without physically attending the meeting ( and so save hours of your time).

Courtesy of HealthEngine Australia

Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency Medicine education blog