Last week was occupied in these parts by our all-company meeting. The two days of meetings and conferences brought up something I've been batting around in my head for a few weeks now: the gray, fuzzy line between presentations and training.
I'm defining a "presentation" as any talk that seeks to persuade its listeners about an opinion or fact, and "training" as any meeting that wants to teach its attendees something. Frequently, presentations also seek to teach. And more often than not, training must convince the student to care enough to learn. There are exceptions to the rule, as I've listed in the diagram below, but in reality, most times we stand up in front of a group, it's a presentraining. We have to convince and we have to teach.
This is why Presentation Zen has been on my must-read RSS feed for a while now. Black-and-white bullet points, whether in instructor-led training or e-learning, don't cut it. And in presentations, focusing on the two or three nuggets you want your listeners to walk away with is critical.
I live with one foot in each of these worlds, and I see instructional design and presentation design heading in convergent directions. I think they'll both make much faster headway the more they borrow from each other. What do you think - where do you see these two fields coming together, and where do you see them standing apart?
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