Re: [CODE4LIB] conf presenters: a kind request
If your university or any local professional groups have brown bag lunches with presentations, or anything informal and about the same amount of time as the conference presentation, then you can ask the group if you can do a dry run there. -Wilhelmina Randtke On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 11:54 AM, Joe Hourcle onei...@grace.nascom.nasa.govwrote: On Feb 4, 2013, at 11:25 AM, Bill Dueber wrote: [trimmed (and agreed with all of that)] As Jonathan said: this is a great, great audience. We're all forgiving, we're all interested, we're all eager to lean new things and figure out how to apply them to our own situations. We love to hear about your successes. We *love* to hear about failures that include a way for us to avoid them, and you're going to be well-received no matter what because a bunch of people voted to hear you! I'd actually be interested in people's complaints about bad presentations; I've been keeping notes for years, with the intention of making a presentation on giving better presentations. (but it's much harder than it sounds, as I plan on making all of the mistakes during the presentation) On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Jonathan Rochkind rochk...@jhu.edu wrote: We are all very excited about the conference next week, to speak to our peers and to hear what our peers have to say! I would like to suggest that those presenting be considerate to your audience, and actually prepare your talk in advance! [trimmed] Just practice it once in advance (even the night before, as a last resort!), and it'll go great! I did one of those 'Ignite' talks this year; because it's auto- advancing slides, I went over it multiple times. My recommendation is that you try to get various co-workers as guinea pigs. I even subjected one of my neighbors to it, even though he wasn't necessarily part of the intended audience. They gave me a lot of feed back -- asking for clarification on bits, we realized I could trim down a couple of slides, giving me more slides to expand other bits. I still screwed up the presentation, but it would have been much worse if I hadn't practiced. My local ASIST chapter used to run 'preview' events before the annual meeting, where the local folks presenting at annual were invited to give their talks. If nothing else, it forced you to have it done a couple of weeks early, but more importantly, it gave me a chance to have a similar audience to what would be at the main meeting ... one of my talks bombed hard; it was on standards protocols for scientific data, and I hadn't considered just how bad a talk that's 50% acronyms would go over. I was able to change how I presented the material so it wasn't quite so painful the second time around. There's only been once when practicing in advanced made for a worse presentation ... and that's because when I finished, PowerPoint asked me if I wanted to save the timings ... what ever you do, do *not* tell it yes. Because then it'll auto-advance your slides, so when you skip over one slide during the practice, it'll not let you have it up during the real talk. (There's a setting to turn off use of timings ... and the audience laughed when I kept scolding the computer, but it still felt horrible when I was up there) And it's important that you *must* practice in front of other people. How fast you think it's going to take you, or how fast it takes you talking to yourself is nothing like talking in front of other people. ... So, all of that being said, some of the things I've made a note of over the years. (it's incomplete, as I've still take notes by hand, and there are more items on the back pages of the various memo books I've had over the years) * Get there before the session, and test your presentation on the same hardware as it's going to be presented from. This is especially important if you're a Mac user, and presenting from a PC, or visa-versa. Look for odd fonts, images that didn't load, videos, abnormal gamma, bad font sizes (may result in missing test), missing characters, incorrect justification, etc. * If you're going to be presenting from your own machine, still test it out, to make sure that you have all of the necessary adaptors, that you know what needs to be done to switch the monitor, that the machine detects the projector at a reasonable size and the gamma's adjusted correctly. (and have it loaded in advance; you're wasting enough time switching machines). And start switching machines while the last presenter's doing QA ... and if you lose 5 min because of switching, prepare to cut your talk short, force the following presenters to lose time) * Have a backup plan, with the presentation stashed on a website that you've memorized the URL to, *and* on a USB stick. (website is safer vs. virus transfer, only use the USB stick if there's no internet) And put the file at the top level of
Re: [CODE4LIB] conf presenters: a kind request
On Feb 5, 2013, at 9:42 AM, Wilhelmina Randtke wrote: If your university or any local professional groups have brown bag lunches with presentations, or anything informal and about the same amount of time as the conference presentation, then you can ask the group if you can do a dry run there. And if you want to get critiques on the manner of presentation, rather than the content, you might consider checking to see if there's a Toastmasters group in your area: http://www.toastmasters.org/ (there are some dues associated with the club, though ... but for those with a fear of public speaking, they can help you through it) -Joe
[CODE4LIB] conf presenters: a kind request
We are all very excited about the conference next week, to speak to our peers and to hear what our peers have to say! I would like to suggest that those presenting be considerate to your audience, and actually prepare your talk in advance! You may think you can get away with making some slides that morning during someone elses talk and winging it; nobody will notice right? Or they wont' care if they do? From past years, I can say that for me at least, yeah, I can often tell who hasn't actually prepared their talk. And I'll consider it disrespectful to the time of the audience, who voted for your talk and then got on airplanes to come see it, and you didn't spend the time to plan it advance and make it as high quality for them as you could. I don't mean to make people nervous about public speaking. The code4lib audience is a very kind and generous audience, they are a good audience. It'll go great! Just maybe repay their generosity by actually preparing your talk in advance, you know? Do your best, it'll go great! If you aren't sure how to do this, the one thing you can probably do to prepare (maybe this is obvious) is practice your presentation in advance, with a timer, just once. In front of a friend or just by yourself. Did you finish on time, and get at least half of what was important in? Then you're done preparing, that was it! Yes, if you're going to have slides, this means making your slides or notes/outline in advance so you can practice your delivery just once! Just practice it once in advance (even the night before, as a last resort!), and it'll go great! Jonathan
Re: [CODE4LIB] conf presenters: a kind request
I'm gonna add to this briefly, and probably a bit less tactfully than Jonathan :-) - My number-one complaint about past presentations: Don't have slides we can't read. You probably can't read this, but... isn't a helpful thing to hear during a presentation. Make it legible, or figure out a different way to present the information. A kick-ass poster or UML diagram or flowchart or whatever isn't kick-ass when we can't read it. It's just an uninformative blur. [Note: this doesn't mean you shouldn't include the kick-ass poster when you upload your slides. Please do!] - Make sure your content fits well in the time allotted. You're not there to get through as much as possible. You're there to best use our collective time to make the argument that what you're doing is important/impressive/worth knowing, and to convey *as much of the interesting bits as you can without rushing*. The goal isn't for you to get lots of words out of your mouth; the goal is for us to understand them. If you absolutely can't cut it down to a point where you're not rushing, then you haven't done the hard work of distilling out the interesting bits, and you should get on that right away. - On the flip side, don't present for 8mn and leave plenty of time for questions. Odds are your'e not saying anything interesting enough to elicit questions in those 8 minutes. If you really only have 8mn of content, well, you shouldn't have proposed a talk. But odds are you *do* have interesting things to say, and may want to chat with your colleagues to figure out exactly what that is. - Don't make the 3.38 million messages on creating a non-threatening environment be for naught. Please. As Jonathan said: this is a great, great audience. We're all forgiving, we're all interested, we're all eager to lean new things and figure out how to apply them to our own situations. We love to hear about your successes. We *love* to hear about failures that include a way for us to avoid them, and you're going to be well-received no matter what because a bunch of people voted to hear you! On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Jonathan Rochkind rochk...@jhu.edu wrote: We are all very excited about the conference next week, to speak to our peers and to hear what our peers have to say! I would like to suggest that those presenting be considerate to your audience, and actually prepare your talk in advance! You may think you can get away with making some slides that morning during someone elses talk and winging it; nobody will notice right? Or they wont' care if they do? From past years, I can say that for me at least, yeah, I can often tell who hasn't actually prepared their talk. And I'll consider it disrespectful to the time of the audience, who voted for your talk and then got on airplanes to come see it, and you didn't spend the time to plan it advance and make it as high quality for them as you could. I don't mean to make people nervous about public speaking. The code4lib audience is a very kind and generous audience, they are a good audience. It'll go great! Just maybe repay their generosity by actually preparing your talk in advance, you know? Do your best, it'll go great! If you aren't sure how to do this, the one thing you can probably do to prepare (maybe this is obvious) is practice your presentation in advance, with a timer, just once. In front of a friend or just by yourself. Did you finish on time, and get at least half of what was important in? Then you're done preparing, that was it! Yes, if you're going to have slides, this means making your slides or notes/outline in advance so you can practice your delivery just once! Just practice it once in advance (even the night before, as a last resort!), and it'll go great! Jonathan -- Bill Dueber Library Systems Programmer University of Michigan Library
Re: [CODE4LIB] conf presenters: a kind request
On Feb 4, 2013, at 11:25 AM, Bill Dueber wrote: [trimmed (and agreed with all of that)] As Jonathan said: this is a great, great audience. We're all forgiving, we're all interested, we're all eager to lean new things and figure out how to apply them to our own situations. We love to hear about your successes. We *love* to hear about failures that include a way for us to avoid them, and you're going to be well-received no matter what because a bunch of people voted to hear you! I'd actually be interested in people's complaints about bad presentations; I've been keeping notes for years, with the intention of making a presentation on giving better presentations. (but it's much harder than it sounds, as I plan on making all of the mistakes during the presentation) On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 10:47 AM, Jonathan Rochkind rochk...@jhu.edu wrote: We are all very excited about the conference next week, to speak to our peers and to hear what our peers have to say! I would like to suggest that those presenting be considerate to your audience, and actually prepare your talk in advance! [trimmed] Just practice it once in advance (even the night before, as a last resort!), and it'll go great! I did one of those 'Ignite' talks this year; because it's auto- advancing slides, I went over it multiple times. My recommendation is that you try to get various co-workers as guinea pigs. I even subjected one of my neighbors to it, even though he wasn't necessarily part of the intended audience. They gave me a lot of feed back -- asking for clarification on bits, we realized I could trim down a couple of slides, giving me more slides to expand other bits. I still screwed up the presentation, but it would have been much worse if I hadn't practiced. My local ASIST chapter used to run 'preview' events before the annual meeting, where the local folks presenting at annual were invited to give their talks. If nothing else, it forced you to have it done a couple of weeks early, but more importantly, it gave me a chance to have a similar audience to what would be at the main meeting ... one of my talks bombed hard; it was on standards protocols for scientific data, and I hadn't considered just how bad a talk that's 50% acronyms would go over. I was able to change how I presented the material so it wasn't quite so painful the second time around. There's only been once when practicing in advanced made for a worse presentation ... and that's because when I finished, PowerPoint asked me if I wanted to save the timings ... what ever you do, do *not* tell it yes. Because then it'll auto-advance your slides, so when you skip over one slide during the practice, it'll not let you have it up during the real talk. (There's a setting to turn off use of timings ... and the audience laughed when I kept scolding the computer, but it still felt horrible when I was up there) And it's important that you *must* practice in front of other people. How fast you think it's going to take you, or how fast it takes you talking to yourself is nothing like talking in front of other people. ... So, all of that being said, some of the things I've made a note of over the years. (it's incomplete, as I've still take notes by hand, and there are more items on the back pages of the various memo books I've had over the years) * Get there before the session, and test your presentation on the same hardware as it's going to be presented from. This is especially important if you're a Mac user, and presenting from a PC, or visa-versa. Look for odd fonts, images that didn't load, videos, abnormal gamma, bad font sizes (may result in missing test), missing characters, incorrect justification, etc. * If you're going to be presenting from your own machine, still test it out, to make sure that you have all of the necessary adaptors, that you know what needs to be done to switch the monitor, that the machine detects the projector at a reasonable size and the gamma's adjusted correctly. (and have it loaded in advance; you're wasting enough time switching machines). And start switching machines while the last presenter's doing QA ... and if you lose 5 min because of switching, prepare to cut your talk short, force the following presenters to lose time) * Have a backup plan, with the presentation stashed on a website that you've memorized the URL to, *and* on a USB stick. (website is safer vs. virus transfer, only use the USB stick if there's no internet) And put the file at the top level of the USB stick, not buried 12 folders deep. * If they have those clip on microphones, put it on your label on the same side as the screen is to you. (so whenever you turn to look at the screen, it still picks up your voice) * If you have a stationary mic, you have to actually stay near it or it doesn't work. * Hand-held mics suck unless you're used to them, as most of us aren't used to holding our hand up
