| | Luke,
Thanks for posting this video. I think it will do some good and make some folks associated with NCGS look up from their desks (if or when they see it).
I have a lot of experience as an educator and as an independent thinker. Your presentation is very clean and up to academic standards, but is also a little on the dry side. I found myself getting bored, due to your relative lack of elaboration on the bullet points. As a presenter, I learned not to just read the bullet points of a PowerPoint presentation to my audience. There is a benefit to reading the bullet points to them while they see them on the screen, but there is a drawback to doing only that.
The good thing about reading the words on the screen is that you get to add some character to the words with personal or vocal inflections and whatnot. You did a little of this but, for me (and I suspect for others, too), I was a little put off by the lack of interesting inflection on the whole. Perhaps it's just your personality style and focus. You focused on making clear points, rather than focusing on grabbing the interest or attention of others and then, with their full attention, trying to get clear.
The whole thing started with you addressing your audience as "young people." Now, it's true that most of the readers will likely be younger than you -- your target audience is a student body, for god sakes -- but I was put off by the phrase and thought to myself: "Oh boy, someone is about to lecture [perjorative] me on something -- let's see if I can stay awake for this." And my initial impression was, in my experience, correct.
The bad thing about only reading bullet points without colorful elaboration -- or some kind of startling voice inflection -- is that you lose your audience's attention. Now, you can either take my word for it or not take my word for it. You can take what I say here as constructive criticism or not constructive criticism. But, I'm asking you to trust me when I tell you that I'm very good at presenting -- like an artist -- and that presentations work better when done differently.
Take the sentence: "I really know." It's not in your presentation, it's just a sentence. You can make the words come alive and capture an audience's attention. There are only 3 words, but there are more than 3 ways to present them (and some ways better than others). I won't elaborate more than that. My point is that your presentation was clean and well-researched, it had good points -- but it didn't pull me in.
Ed
|
|
