Although the overall task seemed a little bit confusing at first, it was a pretty straight forward one. Anyway the presentations where taped and I hope we will get the footage to analyse ourselves. As you might already know from my tweets, we had to write a reflection about the presentation process and I promised to feature some of mine with you today.
So here we go:
[...]
I was excited to prepare the presentation for this class at first. I had numerous thoughts going through my mind. Despite the enthusiasm, my group quickly encountered problems. “How to narrow down a broadly defined topic to fit into a twenty-minute presentations and applying it to a business context?” We started too quickly and found out great things about our topic, but could not relate it to a business venture at all. Another more systematic brainstorming session resolved this, and we could refocus and again do more targeted research. We constantly needed to ask ourselves: “Okay, this is really interesting, but is it relevant for a company doing business in Britain?” There was a lot of restructuring and “crossing-out”, but we made considerable progress as we came closer to the deadline. Another problem I personally encountered was, that our brainstorming appeared already in PowerPoint. I did research myself about effective presenting and presentation design, but was not able to convince my team without proving with viable sources. It left me very frustrated, but I will talk about the outcome at the end.
[...]
What I learned from other presenters is mostly the following: Know your topic and know your technology! I personally hate to rely on other people’s hardware and software and would rather bring everybody to my room with my equipment. Joking aside, PowerPoint can be a powerful tool, if it is understood correctly and used effectively. For example, importing a video is somewhat more advanced, but if you want to include it, you have to make sure it works correctly and does not interrupt a smooth flow of a presentation. I am influenced by many people about slide design, such as Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds. Presentations should be visual and text is not, although most presentations were featured by bullet points and text. Most importantly though, it is to know your topic well. One has to be familiar and almost an expert in his field. Even if someone has trouble with public speaking, everyone can distinguish between someone who knows his part and is insecure and someone who doesn’t know what he is supposed to talk about.
[...]
The essence is this:
It depends on how you break it down but I think, there are five different stages to a presentation: Preparation -> Research -> Design -> Delivery -> Evaluation. In following blogposts, I will elaborate on each of those steps, defining them more clearly.
Even for myself I see a lot of room for improvement in all of those steps, but it is important to know what a successful presentation contains.
So with this blog and later some video-courses and other content, I want to examine these steps and stages. Make students (myself included) and others aware of these steps. But the most crucial thing to the whole concept is execution.
Everybody, especially every student, probably knows how to write a "killer-essay" or a great report. We know how to proofread and spell check, do effective research, but it all comes down to execution. To go through with it, not to procrastinate and deliver only a decent essay, because "we did not have the time after all".
So stay put, comment on my posts, as I am exploring the different steps during the next months. Suggest alternatives to the methods I propose. Criticize anything that does not suit you and share the parts you value and want others to know as well.
My goal is to overall raising the bar for presentations made in university and later in our day-to-day life.
No comments:
Post a Comment