Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Presentation Jitters

Giving my first UCLA presentation this afternoon on SSO and MFA.  Besides lack of familiarity with the audience or venue, I am also a little nervous that it has been over 2 years since I delivered my last presentation.  I have written presentations in the last couple of years but they were never delivered beyond my immediate management for various reasons. It is hard to believe that it has been so long though.

While I have delivered over 100 presentations in the last 15 years I found it never really gets old. There is always nervousness, although I tend to lose this quickly once I am speaking and thinking on my feet (sometimes in one order, sometimes the other). There is always the desire to tweak the slides one more time.  And I have to fight my desire to add content on the fly and try to remember the "when in doubt, throw it out" motto.  Presentations are best when they introduce concepts and pique curiosity rather than attempting to educate the audience. With a very limited amount of time and a slidedeck it just isn't possible to really educate to any depth and when diving too deep you always leave the audience gasping for air.

Because this is an internal presentation I will not be able to post it, but some of it may appear in later presentations at Internet2 or EDUCAUSE.


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