by The Open University
Available in 42 free installments
Owner:
Imagine that you have been invited to deliver a presentation at a venue that you've never been to before, about 100 miles from your home. The presentation will be one of six others during the day-long event. It is just too far to be able to make a return trip home on the same day.
Your presentation is due to start at 10.00 am with the audience arriving at about 9.30 am for registration and coffee. The most suitable train would get you there at about 9.15 am and this would mean you would have to start from home at about 5 am!
There is a generous budget for the event and the organisers have asked you to let them know if you have any questions.
Write down a list of questions about the location which you could send them to help you organise your presentation.
The most obvious question is to ask for a map of how to get there. Many organisations will do this automatically, but it is always safer to check yourself.
In some cases you may want to consider travelling the night before in order to be more refreshed for your presentation. We suggest that asking the organisers if there is a hotel or bed and breakfast nearby where you could stay would be prudent.
You also need to consider the room where you are delivering the presentation. What are the seating arrangements (fixed or movable seats)? Does the size seem to be sufficient for the expected audience? What facilities are there (electricity, lighting, overhead projector (OHP), slide projector, sound system in a large room, digital projector if you are making a presentation from a computer)? Ultimately you need to know the physical location of three critical things ? yourself, the audience, and the equipment. The equipment includes what you are projecting with (e.g. an overhead projector) as well as the media you plan to project (your transparencies) and the surface you are projecting onto (screen or blank wall). Obviously, rooms are frequently not designed for the purpose of making presentations. You may need to adjust windows, curtains or blinds to avoid a glare on to your projection screen.
Hopefully, you will have covered most of these questions and probably thought of some additional ones ? but remember this was only about the location of the presentation. There will be many other queries you can think of to do with other aspects of the presentation. Some venues will ask you what provision you would prefer and sort everything out beforehand. The point of this activity is to get you to focus on what ?things need to be organised? in order to give your presentation with no technical hitches.
The next section looks at how you gather and organise material for your talk.
