NO MORE PRESENTATIONS

I’m sick of presentations. The only thing I’m more sick of than being battered BY them is having to GIVE them. The very word itself– PRESENTation– makes me nauseous.

But for all the people saying they want something different, very few forums provide the support for doing anything else (and many of those people, when push comes to shove, just revert back to the same old habits themselves). Which is why it’s good on NMC and Northern Voice and a VERY select few others who will accept proposals that are different and provide space that allows for something different and/or promotes access ahead of time so time together can be used more effectively!

I disagree with George that presentations are that important anyway. The information that is remembered/retained from a presentation is small– it’s really about the speakers not the listeners. The same retention could be had with a simple handout– or as I have taken to doing– a business card or so sized piece of paper with a web link– supported by some real conversation, which is what all that “face time” should be used for anyway.

Down with presentations, up with conversations!

Conferences must love you. Conference organizers probably meet in secret and pass your name around. This guy will go, they say.

There’s a conference out there with a registration form just for you! It will show up in your mailbox at home. At work. And in your email.

Here’s hoping you don’t do the pre-conference thing!

We can do better.

I don’t think it is purely a conference organizing role to “train” for better presenters, though I can say, when we run our online conferences, we confer with all presenters to guide them to make use of the tool available. Everyone (self included) can do more to improve our communication skills, but lets grab our own bootstraps (I know you are experimenting).

I don’t get your reference to “turning you down” so please explain offline and let me know what I am missing.

You’re a bit harsh on conference presentations. Presentations are important not only for the content shared, but for the development of presentation skills by presenters. I’m trying various ways to improve my presentations – i.e. less powerpoint, more images, etc. I’m no where close to where I would like to be as a presenter…but, if you had the misfortune of sitting in sessions I would have done about five years ago, it was worse. much worse.

Academic conference presentations are particularly bad. Presenters are often masters students (frequently with different languages/cultures). Everyone starts somewhere. If we set standards for performance too high, I think we would reduce the number of potential contributors. Delivering presentations in front of people is developmental. Not everyone possesses the confidence or ability to experiment in front of others that you have.

With that said, I do think the onus rests on conference organizers to provide assistance in developing the skills of presenters. I’m involved with ed-media/AACE and we have workshops that help people to write better papers, we have a peer review process to ensure quality research is presented…but we don’t have a developmental program in place to help newcomers become better presenters. We develop and peer-review ideas/research. We don’t do the same for presentations.

We’re in the process of organizing an online conference (end of Feb ‘09, I believe) on how to improve F2F conferences…shall I once again ask you to present to an online event I’m organizing so you can turn me down? .

George

I’d say, “do what you can to provide as much as possible” for both people who were there and weren’t. Something is better than nothing.

My real itch needing the scratch is the sense that in the live presentation, a lot of us (and I include myself as I have made more mistakes than not) do not use our time or presence in the best way. Or that I get bored easily. Or….

…but I’m still trying to find a style that works for me…

…and maybe you’re not the person I’m publishing the slides for anyway (I use slideshare as *my* slidedeck archive space)?

So here are a couple or more disconnected thoughts:

1) you speak of having “takeaways” – should the same takeaway work for people who were at the presentation as well as people who weren’t? Or does it have to serve both audiences equally. In which case, what was the benefit of being at the event in the first place? Helping co-create it, if the presenter is the sort of person who tunes the delivery to the audience?

2) more and more talks are being liveblogged; eg here’s a live blog from Clay Shirky’s keynote at Online Info earlier this week.
http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2008/12/02/clay-shirkey-online-information-keynote.html
Maybe a tidied up version of aggregated live blogs can serve as an effective “bootleg” recording of the talk; maybe illustrated using the slides that the presenter has put up in decontextualised fashion on slideshare (i.e. the slides are offered as ingredients for a post hoc remix of the talk?)

3) in terms of legacy from demos – the demo sets the scene for the people witnessing the presentation live; but to serve a post hoc audience who weren’t at the event, does this mean we need to post a screencast too?

I guess what I’m thinking is, the live presentation can be one way of presenting a message. But why does that mean we have to provide “equal access” to that communication to people who weren’t there after the fact?

And why should we be responsible for giving people who were there a complete takeaway? Isn’t part of the responsibility theirs?

I’ve been at many talks where I’ve taken scribbled notes and live blog fragments, then written them up post hoc when I’ve had a chance to ‘remix them’ as a blog post. Being able to mix in the slides at appropriate points as visual relief would be handy?

So here’s where my rambling typed out stream of consciousness commenting has just brought me: maybe the legacy is the bootlegged fragments, each of which give an incomplete, fragmentary, scrappy record of the event, but which capture something of what it was like to be there, or something of the production notes themselves (like a set list, or slide deck?).

Or why can’t presentations just be things you have to be at?!

Btw – seen this? Remixing video footage from a Radiohead gig… http://www.wowow.co.jp/music/radiohead/special/