I’ve attended a lot of presentations at events over the
years and it seems to me that the definition of a presentation is increasingly
getting lost somewhere along the way.
The dictionary says a presentation is a “speech or talk
in which a new product, idea or piece of work is shown and explained to an
audience” but I’m seeing an increasing number of presentations that had a brief
introduction and then the speaker told us to get into groups and discuss the
topic.
I don’t believe people attending these sessions want
this. I believe they want to hear an expert tell them things about a particular
subject that they didn’t previously know and to provide them with ideas and
data that they couldn’t get anywhere else.
The method demonstrated by these speakers who turned
the session into a discussion is the equivalent of buying a book to find that after
one chapter, the rest is blank and all it says is ‘discuss’.
It all
seemed a bit of a cop-out and made me feel that the presenters didn’t really
know the subject – it was probably easier for them to lead the group to a
discussion as it absolved them of any responsibility.
Originally published in Conference News
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