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Dirty Tricks of Presentors
A reader writes "Perl expert Mark Jason Dominus gave a great talk last month in St. Louis on how to give a good conference presentation.
There's nothing specific to Perl, and a lot of people
said they thought it was the most useful talk at the conference even though they didn't think they'd be doing a conference presenation any time soon. Mark also wrote up some notes
that explain the parts he forgot to put on the slides."
So are you saying there is more to it than woo'ing audiences with flashy PowerPoint(tm) shows?
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
I thought the talk would be on underwater treasures. Needless to say, with the scuba gear I was wearing and the oxygen tank, I stood out from the rest of the crowd.
I did get quite a few offers from the ladies to examine their bearded clams though.
Cowabunga.
Powerpoint with 4 bullets per slide! ... and start off with a joke
I've always found this site to be useful when preparing presentations. http://www.tomw.net.au/2000/pt.html. It's basically a troubleshooting/tip guide for those preparting a presentation using digital media and/or overhead transparency media.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Hop Host Ping
17 | sl-netreach-1-0-0.sprintlink.net | 97
18 | gw-amb11-e0.netreach.net | 100
19 | perl.plover.com | 3774
Roundtrip time to perl.plover.com, average = 3774ms, min = 3327ms, max = 4901ms -- 07.jul.02 22:00:21
..don't bar your fans from coming to your presentation.
Right Apple?
now if only that server wasn't slashdotted ;)
that if you prepare your presentation to rely on some technology, then said technology will find some way to stop working just long enough to ruin you presentation. Mind you hot stage lights can also be damaging... ("Developers!Developers!Developers!...")
If you can do a technical presentation without fancy do-dads and nothing more than your articulate descriptions and perhaps a white board, then you will be able to engage your audience much more effectively. they will listen, rather than watch...
It's effective communication that makes a good presentation, not what media was used.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
First tip on giving a good presentation:
Don't have the server with your presentation materials linked on slashdot, for it will not last five minutes into the conference.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
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If your software sucks show a video or risk getting a BSOD.
Since the forum usually provides the Google cache or mirroring functionality themselves, I think it would be prudent to make these improvements to Slashdot/Slashcode. Volunteers?
Examples: "Dirty Tricks of Presentors"
find google caches by searching for:
conference presentation judo
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
If you've already gotten coffe and made a sandwich and the slides still haven't loaded, here's something to keep you occupied in the meantime:
Google cache of a list of talks the same authour has done
Turn off images before loading this page, as they're taken from the same server that we melted down with slides requests.
Haha.. Kind of reminds me of Jim Blinn's Things I Hope Not to See or Hear at SIGGRAPH. Read it for a chuckle..
But this is a link to a search page, which you may then click on "cached" to get some desired output. Better than nothing... but turning images off is still recommended.
Hey - we use Linux. We like living in denial ;)
Before it starts he says "How many people have taken $OTHER_TUTORIAL_NAME I gave last year?" .... to those who raise their hands he says "Well, you should go find something else to do, because $THIS_TUTORIAL is the same as $OTHER_TUTORIAL, only the name has changed"
Never mind that by the time these people get back to registration, find another tutorial they want to see, exchange their materials, and get to the new tutorial, they'll have missed a good chunk of the "replacement" tutorial which they paid good money for. Nevermind those folks who don't want to do some-other-tutorial, so now they're completely out the money and have to try and fight the conference organizer to get their money back.
Dominus is the last person who should be giving pointers on presenting. He's the only person on my list of presenters for whom "Hell will freeze over, Satan will ice-skate to work, before I go see him speak".
If you need to goto the bathroom, remember to turn off your microphone that is attached to you.
:D
Remember the scene from The Naked Gun
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Look at the dialation of those guys pupils in the picture at the top! If that isn't gimped [preferable modification to the generic term photoshopped] than he was on enough LSD to to supply a minor rainbow gathering!
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
--magicians give the best presentations, because they are smart and use the most nekkid and purtiest gurl they can get to hang out on the stage with them. You can present anything you want then, the audience won't care and will applaud at anything.
I have yet to look at his latest slides (i'll give his server a chance to recover), but I've been in at least tutorials Mark has taught at the Perl Conferences. All were excellent - Mark is always very prepared and knows more about the subject than anyone could ask. Also, and most important to someone of my perl ability (not very good), he usually makes the slides available after the class (via his server). This gives me the chance to look them over and help my brain catch up to everyone else...
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
On the subject of conference presentations, I was browsing the University of Kent's website when I found this excellent article in their Psychology section, entitled the Do's and Don'ts for Conference Presentors.
/quit
This might be of interest to the other slashdotters, because though it's a 1998 article, it deal with the psychological impact of Conference presentations, which do not change with year-to-year revisions of the Powerpoint series and the like.
Megumi
:)
I always liked this doc telling the story of Demoing for Fun and Profit.
At what point in a presentation should you realize you have nothing intersting to say, and just start playing video games on stage?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I'm not worried about the content of my presentations, I am not good at presenting it. I get nervous, my voice gets lighter, and I start sweating and stuttering.
called "How to get people to buy your book for $50"
It'll go away in a few years. Honest.
--propz to mjd and ranjit...
Peter Norvig on the benefits of the Microsoft Powerpoint Autocontent Wizard.
and lots of em too.
sheesh, for a room full of frustrated geeks you'd think this would've been obvious.
If you want to improve your presentation skills, join your local toastmasters club. It's one of the best and cheapest way to learn how to speak in public and/or give public presentations.
Boobs, curvy surfaces, if you do it right, you might induce some bump-mapping if you get my drift
Jeez, first off, that presentation SUCKS. Second, put the fucking presentation somewhere so that you can download the freaking html so that I could have barfed all over it while reading it in real-time, rather than having to wait 5 fucking minutes before each fucking slide would load. Learn how to use squid as a reverse proxy, for god's sakes - it will save your ass from a slashdotting, especially for such a trivial amount of content to display.
Second, put all of your fucking points on a slide - don't make me click through 5 fucking html pages just so that I can read the contents of one pathetic slide.
According to the slide notes, there are 43 slides in that presentation, which I presume took 45 minutes. That means about 1 slide per minute - wow! A good idea for real presentations: If you're doing 45 minutes, have NO MORE THAN 13 SLIDES. Rule of thumb: expect each slide to take about 5 minutes to talk to. Anything less than that and you're boring your audience, because you're (a) reading your slides instead of talking to the crowd, which is BORING, or (b) you're spending too much time at the podium clicking your fucking mouse. The more time you spend behind the podium, the choppier your presentation is, and more bored your audience gets. I'd prefer 10 slides for a 45 minute talk, because then you have some time for Q&A, but 13 is doable, because you go faster over your title slide, intro slide, and thank you slide.
If this guy is winning "best presenter" awards, then I shudder at how low the standards have become.
The notes
actually I am laughing so hard at the fact that he actually had the balls to include a slide like that...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I could have wanted more "physical appearence" tricks, but it seems to deal mostly with putting slides together. If you are making presentations often, you (hopefully) are aware of how you react in such situations, but if you, like me, give perhaps one presentation every third year you might find these few tricks handy. I know they work for me.
MMMmmmmmm...spokesmodels....(drool, drool).
Know thy audience.
If you don't know what the audience wants to find out from you, you have very little hope and neither have they.
I enjoyed this article - particularly the rubbishing of Tell them what you're going to tell them; then tell them; then tell them what you told them.
This is the mantra they teach you on any presentation course, and yup, it's mostly rubbish. On the other hand, if you are presenting to a group of managers, it is probably valid enough...