A lesson learnt, a fun experience. Read on!
My oral presentation took place on 25th March. Weeks after the assignment was announced.
Was I nervous? Definitely, maybe.
We were presenting on cloud computing.I was a fan. More than that, a geeky fan.
Things do not always turn out as expected, and this assignment of mine was an avid subscriber of this old proverb.
The good. I felt that our group had done quite well for creativity. We tried to come up with various ideas to keep our audience with us through the presentation. Twitter. Dropbox. Madeline egg tarts. Our group member's face. Fancy animations.
Our members were also very fluent in the presentation topic. Considering that most of us were unfamiliar with the topic on cloud computing, I am glad that we turned out to be expert advisors within these short period.
The bad. Our creative ideas were not carried out very well. Too much? Definitely. We could tell from the eyes of the audience.
"Are they trying to cover up a lacklustre performance?"
"Showy. Show off."
"Get on with it."
Lesson learnt? These ideas would have been implemented better if we had ran through it a few more times. The ideas were very poorly executed, not allowing us to obtain our intended effect on the audience.
Another point to note. We had lack of practice. Clearly shown in our presentation. Time overrun.
"Who do I present to?"
It was a careless mistake on my part. I had failed to inform my members of the addition to his slides.
"It's 12pm already! Our interview had lasted more than the required time!"
Lesson learnt? Practice! Run through the slides before the presentation. Last minute practices WILL NOT make the heart beat faster.
Lastly, I was glad I had made slight improvements in my presentation. Because of practice, I was able to speak more fluently, with less frequent pauses to think. I made a conscientious effort to eliminate "Ums" and "Ahs" from my presentation. For one moment, I was able to grab hold of the audience's attention.
Besides that, I should learn to inject more energy into my tone. My posture was atrocious.
On a final note, even though the presentation did not turn out as expected, I am glad that we had loads of fun during this process of research and exploration.
Here's a video to wrap things up. The topic that started it all.
Cloud computing. Google style. :)
And yes. It is relevant to us.
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Hi man,
ReplyDeleteI think if we practice a little more and delete some parts of the statistics, we could come up with an absolutely good one! Seriously, our presentation is good in content, especially for such a topic.
One more thing, I like your writing style. It’s like reading a novel. Did I mention this before? Haha, I hope I didn’t. I remember my primary school teacher told me that: if you use some dialogues in your literary works, they will be very vivid and interesting. I did understand this just after read your article. Haha .
All the best for our oral defense!
Hey ChenYang,
ReplyDeleteWhile the oral presentation didn’t go on smoothly as we have expected, it certainly isn’t the fault of any individuals in our team. I agree with you that the various hiccups and mistake of our presentation is essentially due to our lack of practice. Awkward transition between speakers, presentation running way beyond allocated time and messy flow of ideas could all be minimised if we had did more practice before the actual presentation.
However, I feel that the creativity that we have injected is certainly not what something we have come up with to cover for an uninspiring presentation. The topic that we are touching on is essentially dull and the different ‘tricks’ that we have introduced to our presentation had the original intent to make the topic more interesting and appealing to the audiences. Albeit these ideas were not executed ideally, we should still be credited for our effort to liven the atmosphere.
All in all, we should recognise that this presentation has provided us with a lot of learning experience, and we should make use of such experience to further improve on our communications skills.
Cheers,
Yifan
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI do agree with Yifan. The problem we had decided to work on was indeed quite vast and complex and needed a lot of detail. Thus, overshooting time was not so much of a shortcoming as compared to lack of practice, and proper presentation of our ideas.
However, we did realize that nothing can be achieved without proper practice, which we shall keep in mind for our future presentations.
Thanks to CG1413, all of us have gotten to know each other extremely well, which is quite essential because we will be working together in some way or the other for the next 3 years.
So CHEERS to CG1413 for getting us to communicate and bond with each other. Hope these bonds developed last forever!
Cheers,
Sasha