One of the most memorable labs for me over the last month was the Pecha Kucha Lab. Our lab of about 20 was split into 4 groups and asked to quickly prepare a presentation about their topic of study. My group was filled with people from all sorts of disciplines so we decided on the very broad topic of food. Contrasting with the organized presentations of the other groups, our broad choice of topic lead to a very scattered presentation which we had to salvage on the spot. We definitely had the audience quite confused at some points.
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| Retrieved October 31st, 2011 from this page |
ll in all though i'm sure everyone in my group brought some wisdom back from the presentation. We certainly have a better idea on how to transition from distant topics and how to recover from long awkward pauses!
The next week's lab had a similar exercise in which groups were given several links on global warming and told to compile a 5 minute poster presentation within 1 hour based on these links. Our group didn't want
to make the same mistakes as we did in our last presentation, so we spent lots of time putting together a lengthy, articulate presentation which made perfect sense. Ironically, it turns out we went a little too far with the detail and we ended up with a presentation which exceeded the time limit and had a cluttered poster. This lead to a presentation with a whole new set of problems then previously encountered in our first presentation. Having incidents on opposite ends of the spectrum like this definitely reminded us of the importance of having a balanced presentation.
This month in Ales 204 certainly had presentations which brought a lot more finesse to the table than our group's. One of those speakers was Maurie-Claude, a graduate student who talked to our class one day to teach us on the topic of (surprise)... presentations! It is a communications class after all. In her presentation, Maurie-Claude gave the class a variety of tips ranging from the visual appeal of posters to the importance of noting the target audience. Two of the most valuable pointers I got from her presentation are: 1. Ensure your technology works/ is compatible before presenting and 2. Use the space on slides to support what you say, not as a presentation guide. These are mistakes I commonly make, so it was nice to be reminded of what not to do for presentations. But with regards to what to do for presentations, I stumbled upon an awesome cheatsheet which nicely aligns with what Maurie-Claude advised us to do in class. I printed it out to support the notes I got from her.
