How I Design a Talk

Hello everyone! While I was preparing my talk, I thought I would share my process in the hope that maybe someone will find a useful nugget or two. There are lots of great resources out there. Books like Pitch Perfect, Talk Like TED, and the MacSparky Presentations Field Guide are great places to start. With AGU only a couple of weeks away, I wanted to highlight a few ideas on presentation planning.

First, close PowerPoint or Keynote. The presentation software is not the place to start preparing a presentation. I like to sit down in a comfortable spot with a stack of index cards and a mug of coffee. While I love technology as a tool, it's just too early. I write out one major thought on the top of each card and put supporting material on as a list. For a short talk, like the pop-ups, this is just a few cards, but I've had stacks over 2 cm high for longer talks. I put everything I might want to bring up on these, pruning the content comes later.  After my cards are made, I lay them out on a big table (or the floor) and play with the ordering. I'll ad-lib sections of a fake talk and see if two thoughts can flow smoothly into each other. Once I'm happy with the general layout, then I'm ready to move on.

After playing with index cards, I'll let technology in. I like using OmniOutliner to help here. I put my index cards into a digital outline. Lots of people start here, which is fine. I like starting on paper because I can sketch things out and feel less constrained. Index cards also don't have email notifications that interrupt your thinking. In OmniOutliner, I break out my thoughts into short bullets. I can drag in content such as a photo of a sketch I think may turn into a graphic, sound bytes of an idea, or quotes I want to include.

Now it is time to decide on supporting graphics. I have an idea of what I'm going to say, so what visual aides will help tell the story? Your slides are not an outline and are not meant to guide you through the content. You and the slides together will guide an audience through your work in a logical way. Graphics can be photos, graphs of data, schematic diagrams, anything! Personally, I like make my graphics using an assortment of applications like Python, Adobe Illustrator, or OmniGraffle. Making graphics is a whole other series of books that you could dive into, including the great books by Nathan Yau: Visualize This and Data Points.

Finally, it's time to make your slides. I follow the Michael Alley approach of a slide with a (nearly) complete sentence at the top, followed by graphics. The fewer things that the audience has to read, the closer they will be listening to what you have to say. If you need to document your material to hand-out, produce a small one or two page text document with the necessary graphics (an idea from Edward Tufte). Again, the slides should not be the presentation, but support for it.  If you are stuck for ideas on slide design, head over to Garr Reynold's blog Presentation Zen. Garr has some great examples, as well as his own books.

My last tip regards the ends of your presentation. The beginning and the ending are incredibly important. The beginning is where you gain or loose the audience, and the end is where you make sure that their time was well spent. Nail these. I don't script presentations, it sounds too robotic, but the first and last 30 seconds are written down and well thought out.

I can't wait to hear what everyone has to share and I hope that some of these tips and resources are useful in your preparation!

Improving Your Presentations

One goal of the new student pop-up sessions at the AGU Fall Meeting is to give students an opportunity to practice their presentation skills in a low-pressure environment. I think we all know, however, that presentations and presentation skills don't just improve themselves. While any practice can certainly be helpful, practicing with an audience that's willing to give you constructive criticism and feedback is even more worth your time.

The week before major conferences, our department replaces the weekly seminar with practice presentations for students (and sometimes professors) to test out their presentations. This can be very helpful since not only do we have a small department with diverse research, but we also have everyone from undergraduates to professors attend the practice talks. This allows for a wider range of comments and perspectives. Perhaps the best comment I received last year was from an undergraduate. She liked the summary sentence that I put at the end of each slide because it allowed her to get the main points and follow along even if she didn't understand the details.

Here are a couple of my favorite presentation tips:

1) Keep it simple! - Science is already complex, try not to make it even more difficult by using unnecessarily complex words or long explanations. Of course, some of these are unavoidable - that's the nature of science. Also, keep in mind that your ability to explain concepts to someone who doesn't know them is a good measure of how well you understand those concepts yourself.

2) Less is more - When considering time limits, it's not the number of slides that matter but the amount of information contained in those slides. Instead of having 5 slides crammed with information and figures, spread it out over 10 slides (or as many as necessary). This is analogous to paragraphs in writing - they break up large amounts of text into smaller pieces, each with its own main point. Unlike writing, however, good presentation slides should have minimal text.


If you want some more tips on how to improve your presentations, take a look at this great IRIS webinar by Scott St. George at the University of Minnesota:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V10W_PZVCos&index=14&list=PLD4D607C2FA317E6D

I look forward to seeing your presentations at AGU!

Session Time and Location

Hello all. We wanted to let you know the time and location of the session. Recently we were moved around in the schedule, but this should be the final iteration. In addition to being moved, we merged to be bigger and better! Originally we were two separate sessions:

1) Keeping Geology Alive: Interactive Demonstrations in Earth Sciences
2) The Challenges Faced and Strategies Used When Switching Disciplines

Our new official title is "Teaching and Career Challenges in Geoscience (ED34C)." To help you plan your AGU schedule, we've kept the session submissions mostly sectioned in time. Be sure to checkout our exciting schedule of talks at https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm14/meetingapp.cgi#Session/2518!

Session Time and Location

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

3:00 - 5:00 PM

Marriott Marquis 

Pacific H

Research as Art

Research as Art is fundamentally an art gallery exhibit where all of the pieces are figures or images from active research.  The captions include a (not so technical!) description of the scientific relevance of the image in order to place the art in its scientific context.  This event aims to present current, cutting-edge Earth Science research in an accessible and exciting way to the general public (or to your broader department or institution).  In the case at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the event was designed to alert people to the interesting research going on across the institution from areas as diverse as seismology and marine biology.

To arrange a Research as Art event, we sent out a broad request for submissions to members of our institution.  We purchased framing supplies and printed submissions using a poster plotter.  We also printed the Title, Author, and "Abstract" or caption and mounted that on black paper to be hung adjacent to the framed images.  We chose to host the event during the department's weekly social hour and provided refreshments for people to enjoy while perusing the art.

This event would be equally successful in a less scientific community.  The one thing that we'd suggest, however, is to be explicit in the instructions for the captions.  People are sometimes tempted to submit a caption from a figure that they had in a paper as is.  However, these types of captions tend to be too technical for a lay audience and (in our case) even a scientific audience without the context of the whole paper.  Perhaps this could be avoided by requesting a non-technical caption and setting a word limit.

Research as Art Event Budget
Beverages	$101
Snacks	$20
Frames	$166
Framing supplies (glue, backing, etc)	$30
Total	$317