I could give a blow-by-blow of the sessions I sat in on yesterday, but most of the material for them will be available online soon if it isn’t already. But for the record, I went to:
- Website Redesign Pitfalls
- Help Your Library Be Omnipresent Without Spending a Dime
- 40Plus New Tools & Gadgets for Library Webmasters
- Flickr Commons for Libraries & Museums
- Continued Online Community Engagement
But I’d like to turn my post to another aspect of attending conferences. I want to speak for the conference attendees. In, admittedly, a small way.
My plea is this: if you’re presenting at a conference like CIL2009, and you’re talking about a cool project you’ve done at your library, please please please make the inductive leap from your case to a more general case.
Lots of speakers (and this happens at a lot of library/technology conferences–and probably lots of conferences everywhere–not just CIL) have a tendency to tell the story of their great project. “We started here. We went here. This happened. Then this happened. And this is the conclusion.” End session. Polite applause.
Theirs is a straight-up narration of their project. And it’s the worst form of conference presentation–if you’re going to do that, why not just write it up somewhere so people can read your story and reach their own conclusions? Both are essentially a passive, private experience for the recipient of the information.
What’s missing from that sort of talk, what makes the presentation of a cool project truly dynamic, is connecting your particular case to your audience’s experience. Why have we come to hear you? To get something from your talk we can take away with us. Rather than expect the audience to see what it is that they should get from your case, connect the dots for them. “So, that’s what we did. And this is what we learned, which is why I wanted to present it to you–so you don’t have to repeat the same mistakes we made, or so you can go straight to the success we had.”
Don’t fear that you’re reaching conclusions for us. If we’re prone to make conclusions of our own based on the story of your project, we’ll still do that amidst hearing about your conclusions; more likely, your connecting of those dots will spur even more thoughts from us. Anticipate the conclusions that the audience is likely to draw from your description of your experience and address them proactively.
It’s not so much what you did as about what you think about what you did.
Take that approach, and everybody will get greater enjoyment–and learn more–from your talk. And that after all is the point of the thing.
Important note: many, many speakers do a great job of this and do so very naturally. May those folks be models for us all!
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