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rabbott Posts: 1649	Posted 21:18 Oct 09, 2015 \| A couple of comments about James' presentation about jQuery. Overall I thought it was very well done. What I liked especially were the examples. James included a lot of running examples, which provided a sense of what jQuery can do. Here are the improvements I would suggest for those of you who haven't presented yet. Reduce the number of slides at the start. In general slides with words about a subject tend to be much less valuable than examples. It would be fine to have a presentation with no slides at all! If you do include slides, try to make them as concrete as possible. By that I mean the slides might include architecture diagrams or some other higher level but clearly defined information. A slide that says something to the effect that the system provides a way to accomplish <something> is not very useful unless the <something> is very clearly and carefully laid out -- which tends to be difficult to do. In particular avoid bullet points. They are almost always too broadly worded to be of any real value. Make it easy to follow the code in the examples. James had a lot of examples and a lot of code. In some cases he went through the code so quickly or jumped back and forth from one place to another in the code or between the code and the running example that it was difficult to keep up. Keep in mind that even though you may be familiar with the example, the audience is seeing it for the first time and has not absorbed its overall structure. So give the audience a chance to understand it before jumping ahead to something else. After talking about a piece of code, look at the audience, pause, and see if anyone has any questions or wants a bit more time to understand what you just explained. As I said, overall I think James did a good job. Other presentations would do well to follow his example. Last edited by rabbott at 21:28 Oct 09, 2015.
darkserith Posts: 45	Posted 21:39 Oct 09, 2015 \| This is James. I agree completely with what Dr. Abbott said. After the presentation I kept thinking that I went way too fast, and I believe it's because I had way too many examples. I eventually put myself stuck in a position where I had to cover too many aspects of jQuery within the time constraint given. I had fewer examples (initially), but after looking over those examples many times, I think I became TOO familiar with them and thought "oh this is too easy or simple, i need more examples" or something to fill in the 50 minute presentation requirement. Overall I wish I had spent a lot more time to let people digest stuff. Basically, I would say don't worry too much about the 50 minute requirement like I did (which resulted in me putting way too much content in my pursuit to satisfy that req). I imagine this is kind of what a Professor or a instructor would go through if they were covering something that seemed to trivial to them (because they have a pHD, or knew the subject extremely well) but isn't so trivial to the audience who has never seen such material.

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rabbott

Posts: 1649

Posted 21:18 Oct 09, 2015 |

A couple of comments about James' presentation about jQuery.

Overall I thought it was very well done. What I liked especially were the examples. James included a lot of running examples, which provided a sense of what jQuery can do.

Here are the improvements I would suggest for those of you who haven't presented yet.

Reduce the number of slides at the start. In general slides with words about a subject tend to be much less valuable than examples. It would be fine to have a presentation with no slides at all! If you do include slides, try to make them as concrete as possible. By that I mean the slides might include architecture diagrams or some other higher level but clearly defined information. A slide that says something to the effect that the system provides a way to accomplish <something> is not very useful unless the <something> is very clearly and carefully laid out -- which tends to be difficult to do. In particular avoid bullet points. They are almost always too broadly worded to be of any real value.

Make it easy to follow the code in the examples. James had a lot of examples and a lot of code. In some cases he went through the code so quickly or jumped back and forth from one place to another in the code or between the code and the running example that it was difficult to keep up. Keep in mind that even though you may be familiar with the example, the audience is seeing it for the first time and has not absorbed its overall structure. So give the audience a chance to understand it before jumping ahead to something else. After talking about a piece of code, look at the audience, pause, and see if anyone has any questions or wants a bit more time to understand what you just explained.

As I said, overall I think James did a good job. Other presentations would do well to follow his example.

Last edited by rabbott at 21:28 Oct 09, 2015.

darkserith

Posts: 45

Posted 21:39 Oct 09, 2015 |

This is James.

I agree completely with what Dr. Abbott said. After the presentation I kept thinking that I went way too fast, and I believe it's because I had way too many examples. I eventually put myself stuck in a position where I had to cover too many aspects of jQuery within the time constraint given.

I had fewer examples (initially), but after looking over those examples many times, I think I became TOO familiar with them and thought
"oh this is too easy or simple, i need more examples" or something to fill in the 50 minute presentation requirement.

Overall I wish I had spent a lot more time to let people digest stuff.

Basically, I would say don't worry too much about the 50 minute requirement like I did (which resulted in me putting way too much content in my pursuit
to satisfy that req).

I imagine this is kind of what a Professor or a instructor would go through if they were covering something that seemed to trivial to them (because they have a pHD, or knew the subject extremely well) but isn't so trivial to the audience who has never seen such material.