Fade to Play

On Thursday I gave my UBC town hall presentation entitled “Creative Expression and Social Networking in a Digital Culture: Why Students heart Facebook and why you should too”. I will be uploading my speech next weekend but I wanted to provide some analysis on my performance and what lessons I learned that I can apply to my next opportunity to speak.

It was my first time giving a presentation in so large a room. Actually, I realised during the keynote presentation, I couldn’t remember the last time I had been in a room that seats 350 people. As I was in a room that is used by the medical school for interacting with the Northern BC program, there were 2 large screens at the front of the room. In addition, in front of me I had a computer monitor embedded into the lectern. Below eye level, facing the presenter were two screens (maybe 25 in.) that showed me what the audience were seeing on the two large screen. I was provided with a mic which I wore on my belt and I also had a clicker/laser to point to information on the screen. Being around all that technology was exhilarating.

Presentation Slides
I was happy overall with my slides except my shot of the Facebook News Feed which looked blurry on so large a screen. I wasn’t able to fix it and I should have used a better version I had from another presentation I’d given before but I forgot. In addition, next time rather than screen shots of the functionality of Facebook I will download the actual web pages which would allow me to show everything on the screen. The other option is for me to break up a full page into 2 or 3 pages of powerpoint screenshots that are of the largest resolution. For my next presentation (probably July), I will experiment explaining the Facebook functionality using saved screens to my laptop.

I don’t use text in my slides basically because my attention span is about 5 minutes so I like to use pictures which I get from flickr. I didn’t have anyone talk about this being a concern, in fact people told me that they liked the presentation and the pictures. I will continue using flickr photos to visually represent ideas I am trying to convey.

Presentation
My hour talk went over by about 7 minutes but pretty much everyone stayed to the end. I had 50 slides which worked out to about a 1 hour speech. Next time I will try and get into the room where I will be presenting perhaps a day or two before, to give myself a run through as well and to see how each of the slides look enlarged. I had alot of content to discuss so I wrote out my speech as I didn’t want to babble which sometimes happens when I talk from memory. In addition, I felt the audience wasn’t there so much to hear about _how_ students use Facebook but wanted to determine how _potentially_ it could be used in an academic context.

Talks/Interviews
This was the 6th time I have spoken about Facebook to an audience since January. Each time the presentation format, theme, and the way I prepared was different. I feel much more prepared now and feel confident that I could give a keynote presentation as those I admire and respect are doing, if given the opportunity.

Relevance
I’m still in the learning stage about how to give speeches that are not just an explanation of a paper I’ve written. Writing this out helps me figure out area to improve on for next time.