What I have learnt by presenting at iMoot2010
- Show your real face – Stephan Rinke and Michael Tighe were right in their excellent workshop “In Moodle We Trust“. Your picture is important in an on-line environment. Recognizing the human face is one of the first things we learn as babies and it remains being important through all our life. Showing your real face express your honesty to the others and the fact you do not hide anything. It establishes the first contact with other people and it really helps if you know who is the guy giving the talk.
- Tell where you are, what time it is and what the weather is – Helen Foster started her excellent keynote presentation with a very kind introduction of herself. If people come to your session at different time zones, from different countries and in different seasons, it is nice they can imagine you in a real-world context. Are you sitting in the office? Or giving a talk from the bed? Is there your family around? Is it snowing there or did you just come from surfing at a sunny beach?
- Invest time into preparing the slides or demonstration – these kind people come to your session and they are going to spend an hour just listening to you – paying their attention to what you say. Give them clear sign that their presence is important to you and that you were preparing for it. Tim Hunt had a great idea using questions in the new Quiz module as a way to show his slides. It was clear he was carefully thinking about what to say and how to explain it in advance.
- Bullet lists in presentation slides sucks – presentation is not a book. One picture, even a simple sketch drawn by your hand, may express more than dozens of the words.
February 17th, 2010 at 20:49
David,
thank you so much for mentioning us in your imoot reflection. Really looking forward to seeing your face live in Berlin at the German moodlemoot 2010!
Best wishes,
Stephan