[tti] My presentation
I’m sitting in the audience at a TTI-Vanguard conference where I just spoke, which means a cocktail of adrenalin and self-loathing is coursing through my bloodstream.
Everyone in the audience has a microphone and is encouraged to interrupt with questions and disagreements. So, I didn’t make it all the way through my talk, which is common here. Unsurprisingly, the comments were quite trenchant: Since the Dewey Decimal system expands infinitely to the right of the decimal, it isn’t as limited as I’m making it out; Don’t we want data aggregators like Google to make some value judgments?; How does this fit with the Semantic Web? Do I know that librarians are holding some material back until they have agreement about how to tag it? I should have figured more audience-conversation time into my talk. I was well into describing tagging when the big red light flashed, and I didn’t get to the conclusions I outlined in my previous post. I’m feeling like I screwed up. [Technorati tags: tti-vanguard]
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Joho, the anxiety
Joho the Blog: [tti] My presentation: I’m sitting in the audience at a TTI-Vanguard conference where I just spoke, which means a cocktail of adrenalin and self-loathing is coursing through my bloodstream. Read the whole thing. David’s comments about…
Dude, I’m sure you kicked a55!
I have loads of sympathy for you. I hate doing presentations. Doing a presentation means I have to commit myself to an imperfect framework of thoughts and ideas, while I’m doing one, I just hear myself saying “blah, blah, blah,” and, when it’s all over, the internal critique begins. Besides, I’m an introvert.
Just think of it this way: All those wonderfully planned-out points you wanted to make are the hierarchical taxonomy, and what you and your audience actually said are the tags. Embrace the chaos! Those conclusions just weren’t meant for the moment, and besides, they can read them on your blog. :-)
Here we have what i call a very good comment, Dave. You can do some more from that in my blogs. And if with time you can teach some people to.
David, Dewey is not a taxonomy. LCSH is. But anyway, what are librarians holding out on?
Dr.D: You have my sympathy — and thanks for saying the truth about what many of us who sit on the Meyers-Briggs line of extrovert-introvert may feel after speaking.
But I can’t believe that the audience wasn’t asking for more! Heck, you could talk about piles of leaves and I would listen.
Also: Messiness and questions are good, remember?
I’m pretty much reiterating the gist of the previous comments but I feel its worth saying again. If the audience was asking so many questions I would think it a good sign. You must have engaged them and isn’t that the best outcome a speaker could hope for?
At the conferences I attend (IETF and NANOG) the audience all has their laptops out and hardly anyone pays attention to the speaker – we geeks aren’t much with the social graces ;). I think if I were presenting I’d rather field a flurry of questions than talk to the back of a roomful of computer screens.
It sounds to me like you did well even if you didn’t hit all of your points.