A couple days ago I asked what was it that Brad Paley did to get such active participation in his seminar. I can get active participation, but it takes work: I have to ask students to work in pairs to prepare questions, etc. Brad didn’t need such mechanical tricks; the participation came naturally.

So what did he do? Brad writes:

I’m glad my “seminar style” presentation worked for you–sometimes I’m a little worried that people won’t follow the digressions, but I think the material holds together well in itself and I try hard to shape/steer the digressions back to the “main topic.” BTW: I write “main topic” in quotes because the outline of my talks is typically pretty strategically defined, and I let people steer me towards the things they want to get from me, figuring that what they ask will always stick better in their minds and be a better “gift” from me to them than if I just plowed through some pre-arranged plan. (It’s important that the material–really anything I do–is a gift to the audience rather than a plea for attention; and when I realize it’s about them, not me, there’s less pressure to push my point.)

The one intentional structural aid for this kind of presentation/discourse I’ve found is to have all the material *immediately* at hand so that when a question’s answer needs some supporting material I can get to it instantly: in the flow of the conversation (and mental funk of juggling my ideas and the audience’s in front of dozens of eyes… ;). My favorite approach is to use Photoshop to show images, and to keep all those images and other elements (like live programs) in that paisley right on my desktop. It’s a pain to go through the dozen or more steps Windows makes you do to replace the shortcut icon with something visually mnemonic, and you have to have a program that will repair the damage Windows does to your arrangement when you resize the screen, e.g.; but when those hurdles are overcome the desktop itself becomes a targeted and valuable tool. (Such a shame that arguably one of the most important UI inventions ever–the desktop arrangement of icons–has been completely undermined by Windows (and I presume OS X and Gnome, etc.) by this rearranging behavior. Some geek’s trivial knee-jerk response to icons being off the screen (I’ll just constrain them back on) has subtly cost us a lot over the last two decades. I wonder whether that geek would have been so cavalier about it if they had the experience of someone (a housekeeper) rearranging their own physical desktop or bookshelf? In this case I’ve heard from several people that they tried once or twice to put meaning in the arrangement, but never tried again after the reset. Sad.

“A gift to the audience rather than a plea for attention.” I like that.