Correct me if I'm wrong (I mean it), but I think that the default and most comfortable setting for any technology trainer is to expound on a topic through a lecture (mostly, with a presentation of slides) then field questions during and after. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In fact, I have been lucky enough to witness tech trainers who are really good at it, who prepare really informative and interesting lectures, who allow for anyone to ask any question at any time, whose presentation slides are so brilliantly crafted that they are memorable enough for the learning to stick.

But still, some of the best learning experiences I have had have been spaces where learning is facilitated through interaction between participants, where more time is spent on facilitators asking questions, where participants are given the tools / resources to answer their own questions, where participants take the lead in knowing what they need to know.

I don't mean to make false dichotomies here. But I've also witnessed way too many tech trainers who do nothing but lecture and create one-way communication channels between them and their participants. Whenever I do, I always wonder if a learning opportunity has been missed because the trainer couldn't draft a better design for their session.

Recently (and curiously and alarmingly), I've been asked this question in training workshops quite often: What do I do when my social networking account has been hacked?

One would think that I'd be used to the question by now and would have a standard response. Perhaps 30-second response that would easily resolve the hacking question. But the question almost always leaves me stumped and hesitant to answer.

There are different layers to the question and the answers can be as multi-faceted as the question, you see. In order to provide the answer (assuming that there is one answer), I usually have to delve deeper into those layers.

Anyone who knows me would know that I generally *hate* using power point presentations (or in my case, Open Office Impress presentations). Personally, I think it fosters a one-way relationship between The Trainer and The Participants, where the former shows what she knows and the latter is expected to simply listen. What usually happens is that the trainer has her go with her presentation, everyone else listens, and then afterwards some time is alloted for questions and feedback (one of my pet peeves is when the trainer takes too long with the presentation and as a result the 'open forum' is tacked on at the end for a few minutes as some kind of cursory exercise).

But I think there are instances where having prepared presentations can actually support effective training, especially when they are used within cotext and with interactivity in mind:

Years ago (almost 4 years to be exact, a bunch of us were doing a training for techie-activists in Chang Mai, Thailand. One of the sessions that we had planned was on 'how not to be a bad tech trainer', and we came up with a list of The Top 5 Worst Trainers in the World*:

• The Mouse Dominatrix -- this one gets cranky with trainees who don't quite know where to point and click their mouse (or can't get command lines right) during hands-on session, and eventually takes over the mouse (or keyboard), missing the entire point of a Hands On session.
• The O.C. (Overly Corrective -- this one likes barking out "No, that's NOT how you do that!", and "That's wrong! I'm right! Do it my way!"
• The Powerpoint Reader -- the trainer who spent the last 48 hours pasting every bit of text about his/ her topic on his 73-slide long power point presentation, then proceeds to spend his / her session reading straight out of the screen.
• The Monologue-r -- the trainer who not only beats around the bush, s/he gets lost in the forest and misses the point.
• The Jargon Monster -- this one speaks in acronyms, weird words and culturally irrelevant references.