Stephen Andert writes about a new wrinkle in this year's Oracle (IOUG) conference: manditory speaker orientation for all new speakers. This is a pre-conference event for helping new speakers give good presentations, and goes over the basics (get enough sleep the night before, don't drink carbonated beverages before your talk, etc.). MJD's Conference Presentation Judo is a great starting point, but there are a lot of little things to remember, and everyone except people who speak for a living could probably learn a little something.
Many companies offer or require this kind of preparation for their employees before speaking in front of an audience. What's different this time is that Oracle sounds like they're doing it for non-employee presenters at their conference.
I think this is a great idea. It would be even better if it were manditory for all speakers, or at least available for them. It would be nice if O'Reilly could do something similar for OSCon (and perhaps OSXCon, ETech, etc.), but realistically, I think it's a tough sell for them.
I really hope that MySQL learns from this and sends its employees to some sort of speaker training before next year's MySQL User Conference. There were a lot of interesting presentations at this year's event, but the presentation (and English!) skills were all over the map. Some of the presentations were positively painful to listen to...
Re:Teaching "Learning Perl"
ziggy on 2003-04-29T14:27:07
I saw that on the schedule, but it's not something that shouted out "new speaker training" to me. It sounded like a specific list of pitfalls to watch out for when presenting a specific set of content. I don't see how that presentation would help, say, a Python presenter or someone doing a PostgreSQL vs. MySQL panel.Speaker orientation is much more general, like tips for designing slides (color combinations to use, colors to avoid), why you should always have your hands facing palm-out, and learning how to deal with the guy in the second row. (At least that is what it was in the class I took.)
Re:Teaching "Learning Perl"
merlyn on 2003-04-29T16:45:08
Well, the "Perl" content was remarkably low. It was a list of our experiences in teaching the "Learning Perl" course. The title might have been misleading, but it was a cute title that I couldn't pass up. The content description really was "how to be an instructor without the time for years of practice".
