Rudaí23 thing#20: a librarian gets to grips with his glossophobia

There are few things that I dislike more than giving presentations. It combines so many things: dislike of hearing your own voice, verbal ticks etc that are seemingly audible (although they're probably not), the fear that somebody might ask you a question that you aren't sure of the answer.

Presentations are an important skill-set for librarians to know. At their most basic, they are invaluable tools to convey information to a diverse audience, whether that's your colleagues in the library, other people that work closely with the library, or your users. Knowing how to do this in as lively and effective a manner as possible is essential.

As much as possible, I have tried to avoid giving presentations, but this was nearly impossible at times, particularly during the completion of my MLIS in UCD. Many of the presentations that I gave were part of group projects, although there was one presentation that I gave on my own. The basic principle, however, was always the same: trying to convey information to your mentors and classmates about what you were doing. Some were more successful than others, but the methods which we used, and the means, were quite uniform: a mostly prepared speech backed up by some sort of slide presentation, usually PowerPoint, although I used Prezi on one occasion.

What makes a good presentation?

Given my lack of success with presentations, I realise it's somewhat ironic to try and give some hints and tips on delivering a successful presentation, but as is often the case with mistakes, it can help you to realise what you are doing wrong.

Preparation

The most important thing, for me, was to prepare. Make sure that you have your presentation slides in a couple of different formats, and that those different formats take into account the many ways that things can go wrong. It would be an idea to have your slides on a USB stick, somewhere that you can reach them remotely (by emailing them to yourself, or having them in the cloud), as well as where somebody else can get them if all else fails (remember: that person should be somebody who will be attending the presentation).

Focus

Keeping focus means that the presentation you deliver is the one that you want to deliver. What's great about slides is that they can help you achieve this. It's a good idea to have a rough idea of how long you will talk about each slide. This will help you to keep on track in terms of subject matter as well as in terms of time (both specifically about certain points as well as in general).

Everything in moderation

Despite just what I said, the slides should not be something that you hide behind, but something that augment the overall experience. Use of media like videos, gifs, memes and so on can be enhancing, but never use it just for the sake of it. Sometimes it can be a good idea to use something along those lines to lighten the mood, but you have to make sure that you are judging the overall mood correctly, and always use sparingly.

What to do when it's all over

A lot of people recommend leaving the crowd with something tangible at the end of a presentation. Of course, this depends on what you are talking about, and the setting. A tangible item might make sense if your presentation is selling something, but we can still apply the basic idea to presentations in the library world. Are you giving a talk about information literacy? You may have a 'gift pack' with your library's referencing guide and some handy pens, or something like that. Another thing that many people recommend (and is very common in presentations) is making your slides available online.

Rudaí23's task: getting to grips with PowerPoint

Seeing as I have yet to do a presentation in the library world, and the presentations that I did from library school were so long ago, I thought I would try Rudaí23's task, which is design a small presentation and upload it to the site.

We experimented with Prezi a little bit during the MLIS course in UCD, and I was initially very taken with it. It was such a contrast to PowerPoint, which had (and probably still has) a reputation as boring and perfunctory. I was initially going to use this for my slides for this exercise, but decided to go for PowerPoint, for a number of reasons. Firstly, I wanted to see whether PowerPoint had improved since I had last used it. We also have full access to Microsoft Office in work, and I am trying to keep up with the new developments especially with Microsoft Office 2013. This is especially relevant as we have lots of students asking questions about different aspects of Office, so it's always good to keep up-to-date with what they're using.

To be honest, I think I found this 'thing' the most difficult task so far. It took a lot of time both in getting to grips with PowerPoint as well as actually preparing my slide show. I found PowerPoint, despite the many upgrades to Microsoft over the years, to be basically similar to how it was previously. It has a lot of features (perhaps too many features) and it can sometimes feel like you need to put in far too much time in order to really understand them and use PowerPoint to its full potential. One feature that I did like was the ease of inserting pictures into a slide, and the ability to intuitively manipulate the picture (and how it corresponds to the text on the slide) was gratifying.

I also found it frustrating to try and keep the slides looking interesting, and not look like the traditional, boring PowerPoint presentations that we are constantly told to avoid. There are so many articles (this is a good example of one) telling us what to avoid, but very few give you practical help and advice on how to achieve visually stimulating slides. I decided to take some advice and try and avoid some of the traps that I had already begun to utilise in my practice slide show for this task: namely too much text and an over-reliance on bullet points.

For the images, I tried to use some playful (and instantly recognisable) memes for the earlier slides against a light background colour. This was an attempt to give some animation to what would be primarily background information about the project. When it came to looking at the results of this project, I ditched these, and focused on images of our new website, and used white background. As I mentioned before, I chose not to use bullet points, but instead had a series of slides with the same heading but different points on each page. This gave the impression of bullet points, but utilised a much clearer, easier to understand message.

Looking at the different options

During the period of frustration with PowerPoint, I began to think that I should probably investigate different ways of presenting my slide show. I looked again at Prezi, and remain impressed with the ability to elevate presentations beyond the normal presumption of something to be endured. There's the feeling of being immersed in the talk, although sometimes it can take this to the opposite level and feel a bit showy and gimmicky. I also looked at Slideshare. It's an interesting option, and definitely great to have another choice in terms of which way you can present your slides. I thought its use of stock images and different ways to display text was very innovative, although there were many occasions that I was quite frustrated with displaying images in the way that I wanted them displayed. In the end, I decided to stick with PowerPoint and hope for the best.

Uploading your slides to Blogger: not as easy as you might think!

The final problem was trying to get my presentation uploaded to my blog. Although PowerPoint has a share option, any of the guidelines available online to show you how to do this suggested options that were not available to me (despite having the most up-to-date version of Microsoft). There were many other options, however, so it seemed like this wouldn't be a huge issue. Slideshare allows you to upload any of your PowerPoint presentations to its service, as does Google Docs. With both of these options, it should be relatively straightforward. Of course, it wasn't. Uploading my presentation to either of these two services resulted in slight alterations with either the text or the background of the slides, meaning that occasionally they would look like I had made mistakes. I investigated the possibility of using Scribd, which allows you to upload documents and share on blogging sites, but there didn't seem to be a free option, just a 14 day trial. What I have ended up doing was taking advantage of Microsoft's option of converting the slide show to a video with ten seconds between each slide. Although the whole experience was somewhat frustrating, it really brought home what I mentioned earlier about making sure that you have your slides available in as many different places as possible.

A review of the experience

As I mentioned before, I tried to rely on text as little as possible and use the slides more as prompts than conveying the information. The idea would be that I would control when a slide was shown, supplying all the particular information relevant to each point that the slide was highlighting. Obviously, this means that when giving the presentation, I would have to really know my stuff and be able to present it in an engaging and enthusiastic manner.

I think in general I learned a couple of valuable lessons from this task. Firstly, that it's important to devote a lot of time to really determining what you want to put in your slides, and alter it once you settle on the 'story' that you want to tell. Also, style is important. It's a presentation, after all! You need to balance the style with the substance. And remember: keep that text to the basics. You don't want to overload your presentation with text-heavy slides.