Thursday, March 1, 2007

Presenting in Baltimore

The conference I just returned from was the Comparative & International Education Society conference in Baltimore. Comparative and international isn't really my field, so there weren't a lot of names there I knew. It was interesting to compare how the conference was run with ASHE, which is another education sub-field conference. CIES has a different proposal submission process (much shorter abstracts and a higher acceptance rate) as well as a wider range of presentation styles.

It was my first conference presentation, and I think it went all right. I made the decision to not use PowerPoint or overheads. My feeling is that unless you have equations, numbers, graphs, or pictures that really benefit from a visual presentation, why bother? PowerPoint tends to distract the audience - they look at it instead of listening to you. They think, "Bullet point three looks interesting - I wish she'd hurry up and get to that." So I did it the old fashioned way, and it was very liberating.

I still don't really like standing up and talking in front of people, but I've realized it could be worse. Last week, the woman who writes the Ms. Mentor column said she spent the first ten years of her teaching career throwing up before class. Yikes.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Ten years? Gees.

Unknown said...

Oh, and thank you for making your comment system every so much much friendlier.

Anonymous said...

Your link to Ms. Mentor links to something about Power Point, not to Ms. Mentor.

Fix?

Basil

Eve Proper said...

Basil: My apologies. It should be fixed now.

Andy: You're welcome! As you can maybe tell I am still having a wee bit of difficulty in figuring out how to manage the comments, though, but it's a huge improvement.

Wayward Hatch said...

You should have gone with us and spoken at the Fentress County meeting. Nothing like speaking to a really hostile crowd to get over your fear of public speaking.