Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Reflection on oral presentation

It was a good learning process of both writing the proposal and preparing the oral presentation. I found it was easier to prepare the presentation and the slides than any time before, since I have digested the topic when I wrote the proposal.

My presentation part homologize with the part I did in the proposal: the background information and the survey questions. It has been a hard time for me to write the background in the proposal, but when I prepared for the presentation, I knew it worth that I suffered writing out the proposal. I was supposed to reveal the significances of taking extra naps and showers during the day and to show the results of survey question 5 and 7 in the presentation. I meant to make everyone get the ideas how naps and showers benefit us and hope they might develop such habits, and then my teammates could deliver our topic of creation a new concept of student lounges with these facilities. Because there are many research data and textbook knowledge about the benefits of naps and shower, I thought I might do something to make it easier to understand, since most of people may get easily tired of reading research papers in the first place. Hence, I introduced in more pictures rather than texts in the slides than ever before. And for the real research experiment, I created the graphs for people to get the ideas. I hoped these vivid pictures and graphs would create some laughers and thus could catch the attention from the audience, so that they would not find it the boring to read the data.

However, problems also arise from the pictures. As one classmate said, it might be too causal to use some of the pictures in a formal presentation. Thus, I should take into consideration that whether every picture conveys meaningful points and whether they facilitates the main idea of our topic.

For the delivery of the presentation, I somehow was still so nervous that I have to have some glance of the slides to the get myself calm and focus on what I was talking about. I tried eye contact and body language, but have no idea whether they were effective.

Last but not least, it was a pleasant experience to do this project with Rach and Van. We did confront some conflicts here or there, but I appreciated that everyone in the team was able to be honest and open to communications and suggestions. We also built up our friendship through the good time and some not so good time together. By the end of the project, I get to know our team name is so true: R and D (research and development) are supposed to be open and it is definitely fun!

7 comments:

  1. Thank you, Dongfang, for all your effort with the various steps in the project process. I really appreciate it when guys like you, Rachel and Van do such a good job with a project like this, operating in a second language even.

    I look forward to reading the comments of the partner group, and I'll give you more feedback later.

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  2. You did look rather nervous when you were making your presentation. I remember you were moving around quite a bit. Not walking around, but nodding your head and moving your hands. But don't worry too much about that, since everyone else is equally nervous when making their presentations. If there are some who don't fidget, it's only because they're too scared to move.

    I think you said your points rather well. At the end of the presentations, we didn't have many questions to ask you because you and your group managed to give a lot of relevant information and explained the points well.

    I don't think the coffee image was inappropriate. I think it fitted into the presentation well, since you were talking about the benefits of napping over simply drinking coffee to stay awake. And yeah, I do think that jokes can help to get the audience's attention.

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  3. I for one, believe that the humour injected into the presentation was appropriate! It brought your point across and kept the presentation lively! Of course we must see and identify who our audience are before attempting humour, but I thought for this one it was really good :)

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  4. Thank you Brad, for giving us much suggestions on our proposals,and presentation. Only with your advice,we knew what we should improve and add in. Thank you so much!!!!!

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  5. Hi Joshua and Joel,

    I am glad you like those picures and humor.And thank you for paying close attention to our presentation. I totally understand how bored we could be if we were in a lecture style presentation. So I tried something new. But I should be more careful next time as I should identify the audience and show proper humor.

    Thank you very much for your comment!!

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  6. Hey Dongfang,

    I'm also glad to do this project with you~
    For the problem with the picture, I think we all forgot the the audience we needed to face when doing the preparation. Anyway, I think we really learn a lot through this process. Cheers~

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  7. Nice and great blog. Thanks for the oral presentation tips. I too have learnt the career success skills through E-learning course. The e-learning course helped me to achieve my career success.

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