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Articles Conference Reviews |
I.40 Oral PresentationI.40 The Oral Presentation Re-envisioned This refreshing session highlighted the oral presentation as a genre. A contingent from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)--Atissa Banuazizi, Leslie Ann Roldan, and Lisa Dush-- presented on how the oral presentation sharpens instruction to focus student writing on audience awareness. Atissa Banuazizi began by introducing her topic, exploring the oral presentation as a genre. She pointed out that oral presentations are a fact of life for science students as researchers and engineering students as designers. Through the use of multi-modal tools, students learn to focus their writing so that their oral presentations effectively stimulate debate among peers and so that instructors and others in the community can evaluate and understand foundational assumptions within the research. Banuazizi introduced the types of oral presentations engineering and science students need to produce not only as students, but as future professionals. Since the oral presentation genre is not static, but made up of a variety of audience relationships that are peer, community or customer oriented, students at MIT are given a range of oral assignments that accommodate and nurture audience expectations. Through the context of science and engineering, this presenter showed how oral presentation influences the need for focused writing instruction. In her study, “Defining the Presentation Composing Process,” Leslie Ann Roldan discussed, from the context of the scientific slide design, the processes that occur in order to produce a slide. Roldan studied a classroom research project in which students learned that like texts, slides also undergo a series of drafts. While the slides typically consist of a title, a figure, and primary points, students learned that the slides need to be modified to fit with the expectations of the instructor as well as to provide clarity for classroom peers. Students first learned that the title focuses the audience. Roldan presented an example in which a student, over several drafts, changed his title to adequately reflect the scientific process portrayed on the slide rather than retaining a less effective title that stated the general premise the student was working from. In the next element, the figure, Roldan demonstrated how the student’s first draft showed the entirety of a scientific process but in his second draft, the student reduced the figure to only show the specific process he wanted to emphasize. In doing so, the student learned that the figure needed to be reduced to display the primary point of his research. Over the course of the semester Roldan taught students that the process of producing a slide is not always linear. As students became more informed through their research, they were able to make changes to their slides that reflected their increased control over the material. The final panelist, Lisa Dush, spoke about electronic eloquence. According to Dush, electronic eloquence is about using multi- media to see the visual narrative. For example, tools such as Google motion tracker can provide a “shock and awe” effect in presentations. Dush stated that by seeing a narrative as an image, the audience may be persuaded as to the credibility of the research. Dush also discussed the desktop MC (master of ceremonies). A desktop MC is like a DJ (disc jockey) in that both take stuff and put it together. Like the DJ, the desktop MC organizes various multi-modal technologies, such as video, texts and sound, to produce a presentation. Dush also considered the use of Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter as a way to provide audience feedback. Using the term backchannel, Dush explained how the audience can provide feedback or ask questions through texting while observing an oral presentation. These backchannel texts can be displayed on a screen so that the presenter can address comments as appropriate. Overall, this session was informative, engaging, and fun. The speakers were refreshing in that they were able to present using the multi-modal tools their presentations emphasized. This panel showed how oral and written modes of communication are experienced differently by audiences, and therefore, writing instruction for oral presentations should be focused appropriately for the genre. |