Presentations

,

It's okay to say 'um' and 'uh' when you're presenting...

,

When we’re presenting we can easily get caught up in worrying about what we shouldn’t be doing. That white noise of ‘I’m doing X too much’ or ‘I’m pretty sure I read that Y is bad’ gets in the way of our ability to relax, find our words and communicate. And in fact a quick Google tells us there are loads of posts from presentation skills / public speaking experts, warning us how important it is not to use ‘fillers’.

Several article headers like 'eliminating the dreaded um' and 'strategies to eliminate filler words and IMPROVE any presentation!'

A small selection of articles on the evils of fillers

Filler words - um, erm, like, sort-of, basically - are all words we use often in conversation, but we worry about using them when presenting at an event, addressing a meeting or doing any other sort of public speaking. The interesting thing (to me!) is that filler words are not all bad, and I disagree with the perceived wisdom here.

I believe that outside of the ‘corporate pitch’ world a lot of public speaking advice seems to centre on, it is actually possible to be TOO slick as a presenter. Rough edges have their merits. We don’t want to sound polished to the point of being corporate or blandly robotic, and fillers can make us sound more human - but the key thing is, some of them are more problematic than others. I divide filler words into two groups: sounds, and meanings.

Sound-based fillers

Sounds (um, ah, er, erm etc) serve two important purposes when we're presenting:

  1. they give us time to gather our thoughts and construct the next part of our sentence into articulate prose

  2. they signal to the listener that the current thought is still in progress and there's more to come

In conversation, these sounds prevent interruptions, and in presentations, they help keep the audience and speaker in sync - this is no small thing. If you find yourself umming and ahing don't worry too much about it! There's value to it, as long as it's not happening several times a sentence.

Meaning-based fillers

Words & phrases such as 'like', 'sort of', and 'basically' are more concerning because they convey specific concepts, which subtly weaken our message.

  • 'like' and 'sort' of make statements sound uncertain

  • overusing 'basically' can make everything seem overly simplified or reductive

  • while 'you know what I mean' can be genuinely useful for encouraging the audience to reflect and look for more nuance in whatever you just said, 'you know' loses any value when overused.

How to reduce filler words

The best way to identify your own filler words is to record yourself public speaking. I use the voice-record feature on my phone to record my conference presentation: I give myself a complete free pass at the time (no self-critiquing during the talk!), and listen back to it on the way home from the event to find ways to improve. You quickly find out which fillers you overuse, and then can work out whether they're relatively harmless 'sounds' words, or potentially undermining 'meaning' words...

There's also some fascinating research on the role body language plays in all this, which deserves a whole future post of its own - I’ve got lost down a bit of a rabbit-hole reading up on this! So for now I'll just address a question I often get asked in Presentation Skills workshops: is it okay if I gesture a lot? And the answer is yes: gesturing is a good thing! If you need to wave your arms about, wave your arms about. It helps you form thoughts and can help the audience interpret your words correctly.

That being said, body-language isn't nearly as important as is often believed. Please be reassured that the idea that '90% of communication is non-verbal' is a complete myth, based on misinterpretations of a 1960s study.

It's your words that really matter.

, , ,

A library social media manifesto

, , ,

Last night at quarter-past-midnight, I sat in my kitchen and was live-streamed into a #VALA2022 conference room in Melbourne. The hybrid thing worked really well, more on which below, but first things first, here are my slides.

The presentation

A library social media manifesto

When I was invited to present on the topic of social media I wasn’t initially sure how to frame it. I talk about social media in workshops all the time but that’s a different thing, really - 3 hours instead of 30 minutes, hands-on rather than a talk, and normally quite focused so for example just covering one tool or approach. In the end I submitted an abstract I was not quite happy with, and then about a month later was struck by the ‘manifesto’ framing for the info and asked the organisers if I could change my plans! They kindly said yes, updated the website etc, and so the slides above are the product of all that.

I’ve tried to create something universal, so whether you work in public, academic, health, school, law or business libraries this should apply equally. I’ve also tried to create something that will help libraries feel refreshed and re-energised - some people I’ve spoken to have talked about a bit of a lull in their social media progress, after making some real progress a year or so into the pandemic… Anyway, check out the slides and see if the ideas help you. The video of the talk will be available in due course.

I absolutely love, love, love this sketch-note of my talk from Kim Williams. It captures all the key points and works as a companion piece to the slides above. Thank you Kim!

The hybrid experience

I realised on the afternoon of the presentation that my slide theme of slate grey and yellow matched my kitchen… What hadn’t twigged at that point was that I’d be presenting in that same kitchen! (The main ‘home office’ space is in our bedroom, in which my wife was asleep due to it being 12:15am, so the kitchen was really the only opion for this.) The people of #VALA2022 must think I’m REALLY serious about slide design and always match it to the room…

A slate grey and yellow kitchen

He’s not wrong…

ANYWAY the hybrid experience worked really well for me, and gave me hope for the future of conferences. I just attended UXLibs in person and, of all the conferences I’ve ever attended, I think that is the least doable online - we absolutely HAVE to be in the space together to make it work. So it’s a stark choice of, either have it in person or don’t have it at all. But for most conferences, hybrid can work well and VALA2022 is a great example of that.

I was on Zoom, and both my webcam and my slides appeared on the big screen in the room in Melbourne. I could also see and hear the room audience through Zoom, which makes a huge difference to how connected I felt - when I said I was drinking gin while presenting for the first time, and heard people laugh, I settled in right away.

The other key thing to all this was the conference app. People could ask questions the whole time on the app, whether they were watching online or in the room. I had these up on my second screen and responded to them in real time, which I really enjoy. Interactivity all the way through is always my preference over ‘questions at the end’.

Anyway, I had a great time, people said nice things on twitter so I’m assuming it worked well from their end too (much as I would have LOVED to be there - libraries of Australia, please invite me back over to your wonderful country! Running marketing workshops a few years back in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne was on of the best things I’ve ever done professionally). If you’re thinking of running a hybrid conference, talk to the VALA2022 people, they know what they’re doing!

(And if you’re wondering why hybrid is necessary, read Fobazi Ettarh’s post on the subject, and have a look at the Twitter conversation it sparked.)

Thanks to VALA for inviting me, thanks especially to Sam Gibbard, thanks to the organisers for letting me change my talk details and also for recording the session, and thanks SO much to the audience who came along - making your way early to the earliest session of Day 3 no less, and knowing it was a streamed presentation: I appreciate you!

, , ,

Book Takeaway and User-Focused Delivery

, , ,

Having not presented at a conference for two and a half years, I recently presented at two in a week!

In June I wrote about the Rough Edges and Risks talk I did on library social media for a UK event; a couple of days later I presented on my place of work’s user-centred response to the pandemic, for a US event: NEFLIN’s conference. Because of my incredibly unreliable blogging schedule, it’s taken me two additional months to write about this one…

First off here are the slides.

For this presention I was specifically asked to talk about University of York Library and the things we’ve done since March 2020. The slides above detail our Book Takeaway service, social media response, study space bookings and many other things in a timeline.

I’m incredibly proud of York and our response - the trouble with writing or talking about it is it just sounds like platitudes. ‘Incredibly user focussed’ is such a buzz-wordy phrase but that’s what we were and are. I enjoyed the chance to talk about the way in which we managed to deliver some amazing services during the height of the pandemic, whilst still prioritising staff well-being - it CAN be done.

You can see the presentations from all previous conferences on the Past Talks & Workshops page.

, , ,

Risks and Rough Edges: Building Genuine Relationships Through Library Social Media

, , ,

Here we are with another regular blog-post, following on from the last one a mere [checks notes] 418 days ago!

I was recently invited by Royal Holloway to present at an event they were organising on academic library social media. RH themselves were also presenting, as were representatives from MMU and Liverpool Uni Libraries. The other presentations were all great (see below) and I learned a lot.

My presentation was about the work we do at University of York Library, and in particular how we’ve seen a monumental spike in social media engagement over the last 18 months or so. The slides are here.

The whole thing was recorded on Zoom so if you’d rather you can see and hear the slides here:

The video above starts from my talk, but I’d really recommend checking out the Nathalie Rees’s talk on MMU, Patrick Walker and our host Greg Leurs’s talk on Royal Holloway, and Amy Lewin’s talk on Liverpool University too.

It was great to hear talks from four different libraries with four varying approaches (I felt we at York had the most in common with Liverpool but everyone came at it slightly differently. There were so many conferences and events centering on social media a few years ago but you don’t get so many now - it’s still a really key issue though!

Thanks again to Greg for inviting me to present.

, , , ,

8 tips for teaching library sessions online

, , , ,

We’ll all be teaching infolit online for the foreseeable future (I hope) and it is, as anyone who’s done much of it will tell you, a very different experience to being in a room with people.

I do a lot of training online already for overseas audiences, so I have some familiarity with this. For what it’s worth, here are some tips for retooling your sessions to work in a webinar type environment.

  1. Plan your session so your audience switches frequently between listening and doing

    I don’t know how you currently do your workshops, obviously, but if for example you do a 20 minute intro, then give people 20 minutes to do a task or two, then 10 minutes summing up at the end, you may find it worthwhile to rejig this a bit.

    In the online environment where everyone is learning on screen, too much of anything for too long is a barrier to engagement. Long talky bits are really hard to pull off, and long activities don’t often work either. And indeed, long sessions overall - if you had a 2 hour class booked, make it 1.5 hours max for screen-learning.

    In my experience, relatively short bursts of talking interspersed with relatively short bursts of activity works best. So take a big exercise and split it into two; introduce part one, let them try it, introduce part two, let them try that. And so on. Short, sharp chunks. (Can you have sharp chunks? Shards, maybe.)

  2. Mute participants (apart from specific times for questions)

    I always, always have participants muted as they enter the online space. If everyone’s mic is live, it quickly becomes a cacophony of noise that makes it impossible for anyone to really concentrate. (Honestly just one person having a chat with someone in the same room is enough to derail things.)

    I encourage questions at any time via the Chat (more on which below) rather than audio - however sometimes it can be beneficial for people to ask questions out loud rather than type them. If you want to do that, have a clearly designated time in the session when this will be possible, and signpost it ahead of time. “On 30 minutes we’ll pause, and anyone who wants to unmute and ask a question can do so then.” Then the conversation happens, everyone mutes again and you carry on from there.

    If you do this it’s important to wear headphones, otherwise the audience’s questions come out of your PC speakers, into your mic, and back out of the speakers again - this causes all sorts of problems and is definitely best avoided…

  3. Consider using your webcam for the intro, then turning it off

    Assuming you have a webcam and video is an option, there’s a balance to be struck there too. Webcam-on for the whole session is, in my experience, not conducive to good teaching. You instinctively present to the camera, and this means you’re worrying about that side of things rather than your slides and the Chat. Especially if you’ve not done too much online teaching before, I’d keep things as simple as possible because there are so many more things to juggle than in an online session. You can choose to not use the webcam at all (that’s fine!), or use it for the intro and then say ‘now we’re moving into the session and using the slides, I’m going to turn off the webcam so you can see my screen better’.

    This is because part of each slide is blocked by your own face with the webcam. I have done a workshop where for specific reasons the whole thing was camera-on, and I found it useful to work out exactly how big the camera-window would be and create a Shape in PowerPoint that was the exact dimensions. I then put this on every slide and made sure no content was going in that part, so nothing would be obscured by the window later (which I positioned over the Shape).

  4. The Chat function is absolutely key

    If you’re using webinar software then Chat will be a way your audience can ask you, and each other, questions. Confusingly there is also a Questions function in things like GoTo Meeting - and it’s really important to shepherd people toward Chat rather than Questions. Questions are only seen by you, but Chat is seen by all participants. Obviously if someone had a sensitive query, the DM-style Question is the way to go - but for everything else, you want to encourage active participation as much as possible. Often the difference between good online training and great online training is the Chat - the more people talk to each other and to you, the more than barriers of it being online fade away and the more useful the session becomes.

    Whether you’re using Hangouts style software or webinar software or Google Q&A, it goes without saying you need to keep the Chat where you can see it at all times. You can have particular periods of the session when you dip into it and respond to what has been asked, but seeing the questions as they come in is vital for engaging the audience. Obviously if you have a second screen this helps a lot, but if you don’t have that option it’s still worth making sure the Chat is visible to you always.

    I tell people about it at the start, and I remind them about two minutes later - I tell them about it again and again because sometimes people need encouragement to use it, but once they do everyone tends to join in. Teaching is so much richer when you respond to the audience’s specific needs, so it has to be a priority to make sure these needs are expressed…

  5. Get used to not speaking

    What separates good online teaching from boring webinars is interactivity. The Chat is key to this as discussed, but so is getting people to DO things and - trust me on this - it feels really, really, weird to give people time to do activities and exercises while you sit there in silence. But it’s better to have a couple of 5 or 10 minute activities where your audience are genuinely given time to try things out and then report back in the Chat.

    I find this really tricky because you become hyper-aware of the dead air. You’re not wandering around checking what people are doing, you can’t see them working or hear them chatting to each other. You feel faintly absurd, sitting there in front of your PC and hoping people are using the time you’ve given them to do the thing you’ve asked them to do. But it’s essential - it stops it being a classic ‘boring webinar’, one-way traffic delivered as a lecture on screen which, even if you’re great at public speaking, is not enough to truly engage most audiences.

    I find the not-speaking part so hard that I set a stop-watch for it every time. If I’ve told the group they have 10 minutes, I’ll start a stop watch and not stop them until 10 minutes is up. If I don’t take this measure, I inevitably get angsty 6 minutes in and then move things on prematurely…

    I always mute my mic for these parts - no one wants to hear the click of your keyboard etc - but check in on the mic a couple of times during the period to say ‘don’t forget if you have any questions or something isn’t working as you’d expect, ask me in the chat’. When people ask a good question I’ll come back on the mic and pick it up with the whole group, just as I would with a face-to-face session.

  6. You may wish to stand up…

    Teaching needs energy, and sometimes it’s hard to bring energy when you’re sitting down! If your mic and other equipment allows it and you’re comfortable doing so, standing up to deliver your session just as you would in a seminar room can really help. Without hand gestures and facial expressions it’s already hard to get your point across dynamically, so your delivery counts for a lot.

    Something solo radio DJs apparently do a lot is put something opposite them to stand-in for the audience - a cuddly toy or, in one studio I saw, a Policeman’s helmet - and they talk to THAT. Rather than talking just generally into the ether, addressing something specific (even something faintly ridiculous) will focus your delivery and make it more human. So grab some sort of mascot and stick it above your monitor…

  7. If you can do online teaching in pairs, take that option

    Managing an online session is quite stressful - if anyone has technical problems you really can’t help them and teach at the same time. So pairing up, with one person teaching and another facilitating, is well worth doing if you can. The Facilitator can be on hand to help participants, both with the logistics of the online session and with the exercises themselves - they can also message the presenter to flag up a Chat question if they miss it. Working as a team in this way allows you to teach better because you’re not splitting your focus. 

  8. Good slides matter more than ever

    If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know I think good slides are important. In online teaching they’re even more so, because they’re the only thing your audience can see. It’s not just that they can’t see you; they can’t even see each other. So something inspiring on the screen is really essential - especially if your online session is coming as part of many, many other sessions also online. Death by PowerPoint will not do.

    There’s plenty of guidance on this site about making good presentations. A couple of posts to start with would be the Alternatives to Bullet Points and the Sources of CC0 Images articles: but really anything with the presentations tag is potentially relevant.

    Unbelievably this general guide to slide-making is 6 years old now, but although some of the links to image sources are out of date, and, frankly, I’d make very different font choices nowadays, the basic principles are still important for producing effective presentation materials!

Accessibility and online teaching

I don’t want to position myself as an expert on this but I do have advice on making your slides more accessible (thanks to Rachel fro the prompt!). The main thing is to use PowerPoint and turn on the subtitles function - if you’ve never used this you’ll be amazed at how well it works. PowerPoint provides subtitles of everything you say, as you say it. You can find the Settings for this in the Slideshow part of the menu:

The Subtitles function, found in ther Slide Show menu in PowerPoint

Otherwise all the normal rules apply.

  • Good contrast between font colour and background. It’s important to have plenty of contrast, for example black text on white background, so the text is easy to read. Purple on black for example doesn’t work. Related to this, don’t put text over a busy background.

  • Minimum font size of 24. Anything less than 24 risks being hard to read on a small screen; if you need the font smaller than 24 there’s probably too much information for one slide.

  • Use sans-serif fonts. Sans-serif fonts such as Calibri and Arial are better than Serif fonts such as Times New Roman or decorative / script fonts.

  • Don’t use colour as the only indicator of key information. You will almost always have at least one colour-blind audience member. It’s important to avoid using colour as the sole way of conveying information. For example, to have something shown in red to say stop doing it and something else in green to say start doing that, is not sufficient. Use the text, or a tick and cross or other non-colour-based-visual indicator, to ensure people understand what you’re telling them.

  • Repeat Chat questions back. This is good practice anyway: if someone asks a question in the chat, say it out loud for everyone to hear before answering it.

There’s lots more aspects of teaching online that others will be able to go into in more depth, but the 8 things above are, to my mind, key as we #PivotToOnline (as they say on twitter…) Good luck everyone!

Any questions, tips, comments, suggestions, advice? I’d love to hear it in the Comments.