I’ve been watching at least one TED talk every day for the past week, and in general they are very impressive. Most talks from 2005 and 2006 can be found At the TED talks page.

While many of the talks are excellent, one stood out to me as something to watch to improve your own presenting skills. Let me highlight what I mean for a moment: There are certain ‘defining’ presentations that show off a particular presenting style, and these are very well known. For example:

• Lawrence Lessig - Free Culture
• Dick Hardt - Identity 2.0
• Steve Jobs - Keynote Macworld 2006
• Michael Wesch - The machine is us/ing us

In case you don’t recognize some or all of the above, I recommend you watch them. Entertaining and usually not that long (Except Jobs, that lasts more than an hour) - but most importantly they highlight a particular presentation style. You learn something new that you can apply to your own presentations.

There are more presentations out there that are equally good, but those four were the most iconic, and/or the first (famous/accessible) one, and thus they have become somewhat of a legend amongst presenters.

Dean Kamen’s talk on the segway and his ideals behind its development (Feb 2002) should probably also be in that list. He uses no slides and only one prop, manages to come over as unhurried and casual (unlike just about every other TED presentation) yet he speaks relatively quickly anyway (interesting example of Alper’s previous post’s comments on presentation pacing), seems to be speaking in a stream of consciousness manner, as if he’s just talking to you without having prepared anything, and yet everytime a relevant statistic can be quoted, he quotes them.

As far as presenting naked goes, I nominate this talk as the iconic example.

Some things to watch:

He gets out loud laughter from the audience a couple of times but he never uses a punchline. He just trails off an anecdote and lets the audience ‘get it’ on their own time. This both strengthens the effect of the joke and offers a convenient ‘out’ if the audience doesn’t like the joke. With a punchline, if the audience doesn’t respond, you look like an idiot, and you’ll need a lot of cohones to continue your speech unfazed by the bombing the joke. Imagine for a moment if Dean’s jokes didn’t elicit any laughs. It wouldn’t have been very awkward. ‘hard jokes’ shouldn’t be in presentations unless you know what you are doing, but you can’t really overdo the ’soft joke’ - lacking a punchline or a dedicated ‘insert laughter here’ moment.

He engages the entire audience very well. It helps that he can just ride around the podium, but without slides, moving around is not very distracting and can even help keep the focus on you. So, if you’ve settled in for a bit of storytelling and turned off the projector, start pacing!

Where you make an unlikely claim, back it up with a number. You don’t need to delve into quoting sources, (but expect questions and have a file ready to quote sources when challenged) and you certainly don’t need to highlight it on a slide, but it does convey a sense of professionalism, a sense that you know what you’re doing.

Remember that this speech was given 2002, before the Segway’s less than stellar impact on humanity has become apparent.

I graduated from university recently and having spent some seven odd years at that venerable institution, I have collected some baggage which I need to express but which I also feel would help educators to improve themselves.

I think the word is catharsis.

Due to an administrative mixup and some human errors (both not completely my fault), I still have to follow one course: in4012tu Speech and Language Processing. This isn’t too much of a pain because languages are completely my thing and it gives me an excuses to pretend that I am a student for two more months.

One risk is that I stand the chance of being the gunner in this class. It is really easy to ignore the mantra: Learn, not teach.

Recording

One idea that I have concerns recording lectures. Our lectures have to be given in English if somebody in the hall requests it. This is very much to the chagrin of most our lecturers. Teachers at DUT have to lecture Masters courses in English but most of them hardly relish this opportunity to improve their language skills.

One of the overlooked advantages of lecturing in English is that it greatly increases your reach, not only to those one or two international students in the lecture hall, but to the entire world.

Seeing as all major conferences are already being recorded to be publicized after the fact, wouldn’t it be completely trivial for an university to do the same with lectures? And even if it wasn’t provided by university, I think anybody with a Macbook could easily tape themselves with the builtin iSight. Last weekend I did an impromptu video shoot and had it uploaded to YouTube within minutes.

The quality of the material, though not optimal, would be wholly acceptable for anybody interested in learning the stuff. With some extra effort the lecturer could also sync his slides to the video stream in a custom application (Slideshare + YouTube mashup anybody?) to provide a better viewing experience.

I can think of a great number of advantages but here’s one to start you off:
Giving a lecture is an important and time consuming activity and as such also should be worth recording for future reference. The value of creating a personal video archive of yourself telling interesting stuff should be directly evident to everybody. Publishing that video on a personal blog would further increase your value as a teacher/scholar. You could show the world that you are a valuable and interesting person and build a global following.
Just think what this would do for your next job interview or your chances of getting tenure.

Why would you not do this? One real reason could be the university’s intellectual property stance. Is a lecturer allowed to record his own lecture and do cool stuff with it? I have no clue but it seems worth a try.

Hyperspeed

Second point is the speed at which most lectures are given. This is not completely to my taste. I hope this isn’t representative of the speed at which university students absorb information because if so, then the innovation position of the Netherlands is in deep shit indeed.

Hyperspeed is a feature. After my graduation talk some people told me that not only had I started off too fast but that I also was accelerating during the course of my presentation. This was in part because I was nervous but mostly just because I had a lot to say and a limited amount of time in which to say it.

There are excellent speakers who have also learned to pace themselves very well and use rhythm and silence for maximum effect and information conveyance (see some at TED). This can work for expert communicators but in most cases going too slow is definitely a bug and runs the risk of putting me and the rest of your audience to sleep.

There are also speakers who go really fast and don’t effect less because of it. One of the best lectures I attended at university was given by Charl Botha and in my memory it stands out like a visual TGV ride.

I definitely think I can improve on my presenting and pacing but speed per se will probably not be one of the first things to be improved. Next time you see me present, just “Prepare for ludicrous speed”.

A suggested improvement to speedup lectures: have everybody watch all the slides in advance and make mental notes about stuff that isn’t clear. Have the lecturer go through the slides at high speed only stopping for questions. Use the rest of the time to do non-sleep inducing stuff.