In my short career, I have attended many professional conferences, and I quickly learned that it's a bit of a crap shoot as to whether or not the concurrent sessions will match the exciting presentation summaries in the program book. Last year, I attended a conference for librarians interested in technology in libraries, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that almost all of the sessions I attended were as good, if not better than I expected. However, I made one fatal error in choosing to attend a dry, poorly presented session that would have been better delivered as a paper in a professional journal. The laughter and clapping from the session next door added to my disappointment and frustration.

Several weeks after the conference, a video of the more entertaining (and informative) session was posted online, and I was able to watch what I had missed. This particular presentation was done in a style imported from Japan called pecha kucha. Several presenters were given a set period of time to deliver their arguments for or against some aspect of the general topic of the session, using 20 slides with no text, and which advanced every 20 seconds. The end result was a collection of presentations that focused the audience's attention on the key points the presenters wanted to convey, rather than on their laptops or smart phones.

Creating an effective presentation that uses visual elements to enhance information delivery is not an easy task, and even with the structure of the pecha kucha format, some of the presenters struggled to find the right combination of images and spoken word. In her book slide:ology - The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, presentation design expert Nancy Duarte writes, "Unfortunately, most people never make the jump from verbal expression — which is what we were all taught in school — to effective visual expression, which is neither easy nor natural. Slides are thus stranded into a no man's land where the general population doesn't know how to effectively produce or deliver them."