Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Talking at Lightning Speed?

Can I just say now that whoever invented the stopwatch should be banned from the world--cast adrift, purged from the history books, given a one-way ticket to another planet? (Can you feel my frustration here?)

I've spent the last week preparing a presentation for something called TacTalks--UW Tacoma's version of TED Talks--where graduate students from programs all across the campus present "lightning talks" about their research. In five minutes. With timed slides. For someone who doesn't really have a clue how to make a long story short

Arrrrrrgh!

I did a trial run in class last night and it went pretty well. Five minutes isn't much time, and 15 seconds per slide is even less--even if 20 slides do add up to 5 minutes!

Anyway, it took me all weekend to write the script, time the script, break the script down into 15 second bites, rework the script, rewrite the slides--but I did it. And it worked--pretty darn well!

Until this morning when I discovered that I had one too many slides in my presentation.

:(

So, after taking a few minutes to consider the possibility that no one would notice...and deciding they probably would...I set to work once more, reworking my presentation to remove 15 seconds from an already much-too-short presentation.

Somehow I did it. Now I just have to re-time it and make sure it still makes sense.

If you're free Thursday afternoon at 4:30 pm, you can come by the UW Tacoma Tioga Library building and see if I was successful.

But don't be late! I won't be talking for very long.




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