Colloquium Tips

Here are some useful tips for your presentation:

If something is important, it should be both said and seen (i.e. both the spoken and visual channels should be used as redundant indicators)
Information should be presented such that its importance corresponds with the amount of time spent presenting the information and the visual/spoken emphasis it is given.
Animation can be a useful tool for emphasis (and thus signaling importance of the animated information), but should usually only be used for that purpose.
One useful general heuristic: design your presentation so as to minimize cognitive effort by the audience
If you show a graph, you must explain slowly what’s on the x-axis and what is on the y-axis, and then explain the trend you want the audience to see
Corollary: if you show a non-trivial table, explain what the rows are, then the columns, then discuss the trend
Humor is great and usually required, but should not take away from the message. In fact, it should support the message.

Grad students should never use self-detrimental humor. Try to think of alternatives, but worst comes to worst, make fun of your advisor instead. We’re easy targets.
Try to weave a single or small number of examples throughout the presentation
If you present text more than a few words long as data, it should be read outloud verbatim
People can’t read and listen at the same time

Use low-fidelity prototyping
Prior to making a single slide, I generally put together a very detailed outline of the presentation – including what slides should look like – entirely in text.
As is typical in low-fidelity prototyping, this allows you to make large changes with very limited cost, which is not the case when you start by making slides.

Do at least one practice talk, and expect to substantially alter your talk afterwards
Practice like crazy
It is easy to distinguish a well-practiced presentation from a poorly-practiced one
Going through your full presentation more than 15 times is not unreasonable
Well-practiced presentations are much more fun to give: you get to walk around the stage, etc., instead of being glued to your slide notes

Google Slides seems to result in more run-time errors than other presentation software, at least as of 1/19
And minor bugs like offset problems
Never use any text color that remotely resembles yellow
If you prefer to script out the talk, you need to be prepared in case you can’t look at the script
Try to make sure there’s at least one graphic that communicates the basic idea of the presentation in a single slide. This is important for social media success during slide sharing and with the audience sharing info when they see it.

Source: Mattermost #thesis