Saturday, October 3, 2015

Rudai Twenty : Presentations

Addressing the crowd


Bilbo's Birthday


I dislike making speeches or giving presentations. In small groups I am able to speak well and get my points across but in rooms full of people I get quite scared. I am quite a shy person so I used to introduce myself loudly not quite shout out my name but not far off. This helped me get rid of some of the nerves I was feeling. Getting the tone of voice is difficult and keeping it mixed so that I didn't have a monotonous drone. Linked to getting the voice right is the timing problem explaining the issues in the allotted space can take a some practice but sometimes it can be even worse to finish before time.  In my experience I did speak far to fast. 

In many of the presentations or lectures I have attended for work or pleasure I have found that many don't know how to give good presentations. In one instance the speaker proceeded to read his 10,000 word thesis in a 1 hour 30 minute lecture that was only meant to be forty minutes. In another on cataloguing the speakers slides were so badly designed that I could not read them. The background and font colour were clashing and the images were fuzzy. I would be critical of his speaking style as he took a complicated topic and made even more so. 

My experience of giving presentations were in my third level and post graduate education. Here I used the first three types listed the the exposition, the showpiece, the conversation. The sales pitch while I have not completed one I have taken part as a member of the audience. A company did give the library where I was employed an overview of a new system that they were trying to sell us. It was an online presentation which had a voice over and slides followed by a phone conversation. 

Putting together your speech is a time consuming job. It has to sound natural and flowing all the points leading into and on form each other. It is a less forgiving than anything written. Similar to podcasting knowing your script is vital. 



Building slides is hard what do you put on them? pictures is permission needed?, are they focused properly? Bullet points have recently been spoken against. How much text is to much? I have only used PowerPoint. It is useful but I agree that its strengths can be its weakness in that too slides can be over busy with words and pictures. I have never used Prezi and when I looked at the site the cost was quite a lot a €10 a month. 

I have included here in this post a mini Pecha Kucha presentation I did for the Digital media production for the MLIS. It was on the volunteer library myself and other set up in the local village. This was a 3 min lecture with timed slides that moved every 20 sec or so with musical interludes. This type of presentation works better with lots of photos and little text unfortunately the library had been damaged by flooding and I got no photos of the library itself so had to take lots of the village instead. Looking at it now I can see lots of errors and things I could have done much better. The text and the colour scheme could have been better selected as they don't really match. It was a difficult process speaking for 20 seconds on a topic of the photo/slide then moving on to the next. But it is suprising how much you can fit into 20 seconds. 


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