Show&Tell Talk Guidelines for Online Meetups

BACKGROUND

All of the Quantified Self talks are delivered by attendees like yourself. We are an enthusiastic group of experimenters, tool makers and learners. Our main method for knowledge dissemination is the Show&Tell talk. The following are guidelines to help you give a talk within a videoconferencing context that is useful to others while faithfully representing your project.

TIME LIMITS

Please keep the main part of your talk to 10 minutes. We’ll have 5 minutes for Q&A. If we stay on schedule and have time at the end, we may open up additional Q&A for all of the speakers.

THE SHOW&TELL FORMAT FOR ONLINE PRESENTATIONS

The main goal of the show&tell talk is to share your process and how that allowed you to gain some novel insight into yourself. Your presentation should answer these three questions:
What did you do; How did you do it; What did you learn?

To help keep presenters focused on these questions, we ask them to keep their slide types to just a few. In addition to your intro and outro slide, make the rest of your slides consist of just the followings:

  • Data visualizations
  • Data tables
  • Statements that involve personal data. (e.g. “Over the course of three years, I journaled 723 times.”).
  • Screenshots or pictures of the self-tracking tool that was used.
  • Pictures of yourself while tracking. If you are tracking your marathon running, that would be a picture during practice or race day. If your project involves eeg, that would be a picture of you with electrodes attached to your scalp. Whatever helps us understand how the data was collected.
  • The only bulleted text should occur on the “what I learned” slide.

Because of the flexibility of presenting online, in addition to slides, you can show data and visualizations directly from programs on your computer.

Things that should not go on your slides:

  • stock photography,
  • quotes (you can still recite a quote in your talk. If the quote is hard to understand if it’s only heard verbally, it may not be a good fit),
  • bulleted text (the exception being your “What I learned” slide),
  • a logo that appears in the right corner of each slide.

POINTERS FOR GIVING A GREAT SHOW&TELL TALK

I’ve helped hundreds of speakers put together their Show&Tell talks for various QS events. Here are the pieces of advice I most often give to speakers during our practices:

Specifically for online presentations
  1. Share your entire screen. We find that more things go wrong when just an application window is shared. For instance, sometimes when you go full screen it shows just a black screen.
  2. Organize your windows and tabs. If you plan on switching between your slide presentation and other tabs/programs, have them arranged in your browser and taskbar in a logical order so that it is quick to go to the next window.
  3. Share a link to your presentation. If you are using Google Slides, give us the url beforehand. When your presentation begins, we can share the url to attendees so that they can follow along. Note: This does not mean you have to use Google Slides. Use whatever you are comfortable with. We just wanted to mention an advantage that service has.
Applies to all show&tell talks
  1. Pay attention to the format. Read the format section above.
  2. Write it out first. Make a bulleted list and write out exactly what you want to say, or at the very least, a brief outline of what you want to say. This helps you think about what you’re going to talk about, but it also provides a great basis for developing your slides.
  3. Practice your talk. You can practice your talk 6 times in an hour. (That should be plenty of practice!) Seriously, please don’t arrive at the meetup without having read your talk to somebody beforehand. We are available to listen to practice talks. Email steven@quantifiedself.com
  4. Go slow! Don’t think you have to speak fast. It is not a race. Edit your talk rather than speed up your delivery. It’s better to say fewer things well rather than talking about many things quickly.
  5. Establish the “why”: The beginning of the talk should establish why you started tracking.
  6. Focus on your story. A good Show&Tell talk is grounded in lessons learned from personal data collection. Make sure that you’re highlighting what you’ve done with your self-tracking and/or self-experimentation. 
  7. Make effective charts:
    1. Make sure the axes are labeled clearly (remember, people are listening to you as they are looking at and trying to understand the slides, so make their job of understanding the talk as easy as possible).
    2. Rather than have the Title Text above the chart be a traditional title, consider making the Title Text the takeaway of what the chart showed or taught you. So, instead of Number of steps per day of week, it would be more like I walk way more on the weekends.
    3. Make sure that text is big enough to be readable. It’s probably best not to go below 40 point.
    4. Use annotations to point to interesting areas of the chart.
  8. Keep it grounded: Take the time to explain how you collected the data. For example,  did you record the event on your phone in the moment? Did you wait until the night and record it in a paper journal that you entered into a spreadsheet during the weekend? People should be able to visualize how the data is collected.
  9. Specialist Vocabulary: Be careful about which terms you use. If it’s not a widely known term, you need to explain it. Otherwise, it makes your talk a lot less understandable and enjoyable. Explaining a term takes time though, so ask yourself, how does the audience knowing this term help them understand the rest of the talk?
  10. Sequencing: Our own stories are so complex. Often, there seems to be a lot that you have to explain so that someone who hasn’t had all of your experiences can understand your project. When establishing any idea or contextual information, think carefully about how it helps people understand some later part of the talk. If the idea isn’t crucial to helping understand the rest of the talk, it may be good to leave it out.
  11. Keep the “What I Learned” personal: When talking about what you learned, use “I” rather than “you” statements. For example, instead of “Tracking steps makes you more mindful about your activity level” it should be “Tracking steps made me more mindful about my activity level.”
  12. Contact Info: Your last slide should be how about people can contact you, follow you on Twitter or learn more about your self-tracking project. We are all about fostering connections and the more ways people can get a hold of you the better.
  13. Be honest: No one expects you to be an expert on the thing you are tracking. Just be an expert on your own experience. People want to hear your story. The more honest and vulnerable you are, the better it will work. Remember that you are talking to your peers. You don’t need to try to impress or be theatrical. We want to know who you are and what you are working on. Tell us clearly and we will love your talk.

SLIDE FORMAT

Since you will be sharing your screen, there is no need to use any specific program or slide format. However, one advantage of using Google Slides is that you can share a view-only url to people at the start of the talk for people to follow along.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Do I have to submit slides in before hand?

No. If you’ve read through this document, you have a good idea of what we think works for show&tell presentations.

Are these going to be auto-advancing slides like at other QS events?

No. That format had its benefits, but we feel like going forward, it’s better that we focus the slides on the data and tools.

Can I really say what I need to in 10 minutes?

Yes, but first you have to decide what you need to say. Focus on what the main idea is. Then use details that support that main idea. If something is interesting but doesn’t support the main idea, leave it out. It can be hard to cut things out, but it helps people focus on the main idea of your talk.
TIP: If there is a detail that I left out of my talk, I’ve found it easy to shoehorn it into an answer during the Q&A period.

How can I be sure my talk is working?

We want to take an active role in helping you give the best talk possible. Therefore, we are available to talk through ideas, give feedback, and sit for practice talks. Contact Steven at steven@quantifiedself.com.

I have a question not addressed here.

Other questions can go to Steven Jonas: steven@quantifiedself.com