This is a continuation of the previous session on communication with general audiences.
Pre-class work
Instructions: Revise your slides from this past week based on feedback from your peers, as well as based on the class discussion about storytelling. This time, you’ll be given 10 minutes to present.
As you’ve all seen from class, keeping a presentation within a time limit can be challenging! Please practice your talk before class to make sure it comfortably fits within the allotted time!
Again, assume a general audience that has some (but not a lot of) familiarity with CS (e.g. first-year college students interested in CS). Though you can be as pedagogical as is useful to explain the research, keep in mind that this should be a talk about research, not a lecture.
Tips from last class:
- Plan your talk with a goal as a presenter and an audience in mind. This will help you “streamline” your presentation. One way to do this is to ask yourself, “given the time constraints and my audience’s background, what’s one thing that I want them to take away from my talk?” For example,
- In a 10-min talk to a general audience, your goal might be to communicate why your research problem is interesting and difficult to solve.
- In a 5-min “spotlight talk” in a conference/workshop, your goal is to get as many people to read your paper or visit your poster – so the main takeaway could be “Wow this is cool – I’ve got to learn more about this!”
- In a 45-min technical talk to researchers in your field, you may want them to understand the nitty-gritty details that you enjoy about your project.
- Plan your narrative as if it were a Pixar movie or a fairytale: “Once upon a time there was __. Every day, __. One day __. Because of that, __. Because of that, __. Until finally __.”
- If it helps your narrative, don’t be afraid to walk people through your research process (including the “failures”). It can build investment by making people wonder “what will be the solution?”, and it’s transparent about good research!
- Be cognizant of words that are commonplace in your field of research but that your audience (1) may not know and (2) may have a different meaning.
- If your talk involves math/equations:
- Use math sparingly; find minimal examples of the problem that one can follow, both in terms of intuition and notation
- Speak in words, point to corresponding symbols
Please submit a PDF of your slides and answer: in what ways has your talk changed from last week to this week?
In class
- [10min] Students socialize
- [10min] The experiences of presenting at US-based conferences as an international, non-native Engish speakers: What are the challenges?
- [20min] Two examples of the same talk: one for a technical audience in the field, and one for a general audience.
- [10min + 10min] In small groups: what are the differences? Synthesize as a group.
- [45min] Practice presenting in groups of 3: 10min per presentation + 5min for feedback, repeated 3 times. For the feedback phase, ask the student who just presented to first discuss what they think went well and what could have gone better.
- [10min] As a group: What was hard? What worked well? How will you improve your presentation in the future?
- [5min] In-class survey: What did you take away from class today?