Presentation Notes

I have just been having a think about the presentation on Wednesday. It is a challenge to say the least to condense a semester's work into under 4 minutes. Practicing last week definitely helped - even before we did our presentation for the class we were practicing and trying to cut our material down. Even so, we still went over 5 minutes overtime, and that was not even with too much of an introduction or a conclusion. We discussed this yesterday and over the weekend are re-writing our speeches then meeting on Monday to practice and make sure that we have a presentation that although concise, covers all the main areas we wish to address.

We met with Geoff yesterday afternoon to discuss the feedback from the peer assessed presentation practice. Looking at this, our strength was in our content, we went pretty well in the clarity of the presentation, and the brief, but need to work on sustaining interest. From sitting through the other presentations, I think this is the area that is possibly lowest for most of us 'draggy...I lost concentration and interest' - ouch. :) It is difficult to work out how to sustain the interest of people in research that they might not even be that interested in, especially when they are listening to a number of projects - how to make yours stand out? Kind of wondering how many people will be sticking around realistically until our project at 3 something. From other peoples' projects this is what I think could help (ah, I can use dot points again):

• having a variety of media or examples, but knowing with these where they are appropriate to insert


• not having too much information up if using slides as they are distracting and


• Speaking clearly - making sure that any media examples are easy to hear


• not to simply read points directly off slides


• Simplifying points so that they are easy to digest for listeners

Back to the feedback. In the comments section, there seemed to be a bit of confusion as to what out overall research question was - even though we had it on our title slide (one even said media law reform which was only one section of our overall question) - think Geoff is right that a bit of reinforcement is the key to this one. Talking about this with the group yesterday we thought of perhaps inserting the title slide between each of our individual presentations.

The extract from The Craft of Research in the dossier provides some interesting material which relates to both the presentation and the final research project - one point of taking turns (p29) drafting and revising, getting different members of the group to look at each of our sections to make sure that we are not contradicting one another and there is an overarching goal within each sections is important. The checklist is also relevant for both tasks, who we are presenting to and who is reading the report is slightly different and their expectations differ as well. The former (referring to the course guide here) is wanting us to show why we have chosen the topic and why it warranted research, how we collected our data and the interpretations and conclusions we have gained from this. The latter, in our presentation requires us to clarify the key problems and subsequent research questions - which ones helped us to answer the substantive research questions, and to show that we have done a range of research and that it is of a high quality.



Sources:

Booth, W., Colomb, G. & Williams, J. The Craft of Research (2nd ed). University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003.