The Mobile Presenter

Day Camp for Developers (or DC4D for short) is a series of online conferences for software developers and people from related fields. The motto of the series is Invest a day in your career. The idea is that you get to learn from fellow geeks in a series of 4 or 5 talks about a specific topic. Previous Day Camps were about Soft Skills and Project Management, for example.

The fifth instance had a topic that's relevant to this blog: Public Speaking. So I was curious to hear what fellow geeks had to say on the topic.

At a conference, your audience will usually sit for most of the day. So, understandably, they may become sleepy and have trouble following your talk. Have you considered adding some short physical exercise to your presentation, to make them wake up?

Interacting with your audience can mean a lot of different things. You could ask them a question and to shout out the answer or to use hand signs. Or you can make them do short exercises, in groups or on their own. But all of those interactions are usually done sitting down. Consider an activity where they have to stand up and move.

Why should someone who's giving presentation courses take a presentation course? Well, I believe in the idea of lifelong learning (or Continuous Improvement or Kaizen). Knowledge isn't static, and neither is mastery. There is always new information and research coming out and you can always get better at something - if you really care about it.

So when I had the opportunity to take a 2-day presentation course with friends and fellow presentation coaches, organised by Ideas on Stage in Paris - I took it.

A common myth seems to be that speakers are afraid of questions during their presentations. At least that is what I take from the fact that a lot of books and articles on presentations encourage speakers to accept questions. But then again, I've never seen a talk that didn't end with the ritual question from the speaker to the audience: Any questions?

So where does this supposed fear of questions come from?

The use of humour in presentations is, ironically, a common source of fear and loathing. This is mainly because people confuse humour with telling jokes. From experience, jokes told during presentations are usually not very funny at all and cause more of a collective groan than laughter. Also, the use of humour is often seen as unprofessional, especially in more business-oriented surroundings. But humour, laughter, and an element of play are natural parts of being human, so why should they be banned from presentations?