Public speaking
Tuesday, 08 March 2011 21:01
I've always been a little nervous about public speaking. Especially when they are sitting facing you and you are at the front of the room. However, if you are talking about something you know a lot about and enjoy, it can be invigorating.
For the third time now, I have been a guest speaker at the University of Portsmouth. I have been invited to talk to students in the last year of their MA Design for Digital Media and to give them an insight as to what a professional web designer does.
The first time I was asked, I wanted to say no, but I ended up saying yes. I had about six weeks to prepare what I was going to talk about and so, the inevitable happened, I put it off. When I had about a week left, I started to worry. I got on with planning it and realised that it's not that much different than talking to a client about work.
My brother got married in 2006 and I was his best man. I was proud that he chose me, I have not always been the best candidate but I have known him all his life so I was the obvious one. Anyway, I knew I would know a lot of the people there and honestly thought that with a few notes I could wing it. Wrong. It was a disaster! I muttered and tried to tell some stories from one-word hints that I had written down and it all went terribly wrong. I even tried to tell a joke and as anyone who knows me knows - I can't tell jokes. So it was a disaster and my brother had to save me. I wasn't even drunk, just unprepared.
So I prepared for the Uni talk and began by explaining a little about myself. The notes were adequate enough that if I suddenly forgot what my name was it was on the piece of paper. I then explained a little about the company I work for - Abacus e-Media - a bit of background history and what we do there. I then went on to explain the life cycle of a typical web site design for one of our bigger clients and all the processes that are involved. I showed them design pages, unprogrammed pages and live websites.
It got a mixed reaction. I was expecting the students to be more familiar with HTML and CSS. Similarly, some knew what a CMS was but most of them were unsure and although it padded out my talk, I hadn't expected to have to go into this sort of detail. The students on the MA Design for Digital Media are not there specifically to learn how to design, code, program etc. They are there to gain "a broad understanding of the theoretical and cultural frameworks in which design and technology development happens"*. The course allows for them to learn these disciplines should they want to but equally it could lead to research roles and other and other less vocational jobs.
The following year, with this in mind, I asked questions of my audience as I was going along and this proved to be beneficial to both them and me as I could taylor the talk accordingly.
This year, it seemed that the audience were leaning to the web more in their interests and had some quite testing questions for me. I also realised that it would be very useful to expand on some areas, having more detailed examples to show, especially regarding different CMS's and how they work.
If I am lucky enough to be asked back next year I will have a longer talk planned but be prepared to edit it as I go along, depending on the audience.
(*Quoted from the MA Design for Digital Media course description)