Reflection on the Book Presentations by Jorge Guerra

Hello! 

I am Jorge Guerra and I shall be discussing the presentations we had covering the chapters from the book. First, I will discuss the contents of the presentations themselves, then I will discuss how the information was presented (this part will be a general overview of how people presented as a whole, as I honestly don’t have a lot to say about anyone specifically that wouldn’t just be to the effect of “Jane Doe did a very good job with their presentation and I learned a lot about this topic” for every student). I will be skipping intros and outros until the end as I want to discuss the class leaders separately. Lastly, while I am going to try to avoid critiquing anything, I will be examining parts of the presentations I think could be improved upon for future presentations but these will be broad observations not targeted towards anyone specifically.

Group 1 I would say did a wonderful job. Their title slide is simple but effective and I think that statement applies to the whole presentation. Despite my own feeling on Corporate Memphis style, I do think it works for this presentation and the use of it throughout most of the slides gives it a consistent art style. The color pallet is also simple, consisting mostly of white boxes with text and a plain color in the background, which again works well for presenting. Almost all the slides have the names of their presenters and these names are placed in such ways that they don’t distract from the message. I do feel that a few slides could have had more images to fill in empty space, such as inserting a small graph or character into the side. I’d say this presentation is probably the one with the most focused art style behind it that makes it one of the most cohesive looking of the three groups. The presentation itself also does a good job at conveying all the information the reader needs to know about the chapters without overstaying it welcome most of the time. There are a few slides which I feel could have either been separated into multiple smaller slides, or just condensed. But overall, I think this presentation is great and shows that group 1 put a lot of thought behind how the presentation would be made and presented to the audience.

 

I will start this segment by acknowledging the inherit bias I will have when discussing group 2s presentation since I was a part of it and got a more in depth look on the making of the presentation then any of the other groups. We didn’t make a title slide but we hadn’t considered making one prior to seeing the other presentations so I will just have that as something we should remember to do for future presentations. Our color palette changes a lot throughout the presentation, it starts with a simple bluish-green color for chapter 5, goes into a complex bright pink background for chapter 6, then has many different kinds of backgrounds directly related to the discussed topics for chapter 7, then returns to the blue-green background in chapter 8, then starts with a blue technology background for chapter 9 only to switch to a green technology background midway through (I probably should have made my part the same color as Juliet’s), and ends once again in the blue-green background. I don’t think having many different styles of backgrounds was a bad idea, I think it helps differentiate the different chapters from one another, but we could have made it slightly more uniform as it does look and feel like there are four different presentations stitched into one with how much the background changes. I would say our use of images was great, they helped fill in what likely would have been empty space and they generally enhanced the points we tried to make. Most of our slides have the names of the presenters on them though there are a few missing, but that is a minor issue which could easily be fixed. Our slides also avoided being too long or wordy, keeping the text concise and the few instances of long strings of text were ultimately minor enough that I don’t think they negatively impacted the presentation. I think our presentation was great and got our points across.

 

Immediately groups 3s title slide is very nice. It doesn’t immediately go into the intro and cleanly states what the group will be covering in the presentation. Group 3s slides all have a uniform color pallet which makes the whole presentation feel cohesive and consistent with itself. Most of the slides also have the name of the presenter and the chapter they are covering which wasn’t even a necessary part but makes it all the easier to tell where you are in the presentation. I do want to analyze the use of text and images in the presentation. You see, a lot of the slides are filled with text and bullet points which is a lot to process. From my own experience, when the presenter wasn’t just reading off the slides, it became difficult to both read what was on the slide and also listen to what they were attempting to communicate before they moved on to the next slide. A lot of words and sentences probably could have been edited down to make a more cohesive product. Replacing many of the words with images could have helped with this. Honestly though that’s a relatively minor nitpick, as the entire presentation is solid enough that I don’t think the text length is much of an issue. As a whole the presentation is fantastic and its creators should be proud.

 

Something that applies to all three presentations is that many people mostly just read their slides when presenting. I don’t blame anyone for doing this or say it’s wrong but one of the main things emphasized in chapter 9 (which was the chapter I worked on) was that you should not read your slides to the audience since the audience can read for themselves. That’s one of the main reasons why my part of the group 2 presentation is mostly images with little text as I wanted to speak mostly myself without just stating what the audience could plainly see. My main point is that when I re-watched the presentations, I generally already knew what people were going to say after a few seconds as they would mostly just be repeating what was shown on the slides, which disengaged me from the whole thing. I will restate that I don’t think this is a bad thing, I just think that if people had generally included more of their own words into their presenting, it would be all around more engaging to listen to.

 

I think most people were clearly audible and articulated their points well. The few times where I struggled to hear seemed to be more from outside noises that couldn’t realistically be silenced so I wouldn’t consider that against anybody. There were a few people who either due to anxiety or not practicing a lot beforehand did noticeably struggle during the presenting, and I feel for both cases practicing more would have helped alleviate those problems though I understand in the moment talking in front of an audience is really hard and stressful. Most people also had their cameras on and were clearly visible while presenting. I noticed upon re-watch that many people’s eyes weren’t staring at the camera but that I feel isn’t a big deal as even I often wasn’t looking at the camera and I even practiced trying to look at the camera while speaking beforehand. I guess it’s harder to maintain eye contact when you aren’t actually maintaining eye contact with physical people but instead with a tiny camera at the top of your computer screen. The majority of the class did wonderfully and the few who had trouble I know will do better next time now that we have this experience under our belts!

 

Finally, I can talk about the class leaders. Starting with Samar’s intros, her intro for group 1 follows the theming the rest of the presentation has with the corporate Memphis characters which shows she paid attention to what the group had intended with their art style. I especially like how she decided to make the intro text go from the top-left to the bottom right like stairs, it allows the characters to look more dynamic and overall makes for a great intro. The intros for the other two groups are just basic summaries in paragraph style which isn’t a bad thing as the whole point was for her to give a quick summary of what the audience would be learning which they did effectively. Nyjah’s outros are actually very similar, as the group 1 outro is uniquely organized, with a fun side graphic and overall fits the theming of the presentation. Meanwhile, the outros for groups 2 and 3 are also just basic summaries of what the audience learned. I don’t know when they got the presentations for group 2 and 3 but I honestly am getting the idea that they had a lot of time to work on making fitting intros/outros for group 1 and had to rush out intros/outros for the other two groups. I still believe both Samar and Nyjah did wonderful jobs with their parts and their presenting skills during the presentations were also great. I am writing this part on September 20^th after the Wednesday class and honestly, I think I understand why Samar was emphasizing to us near the end that we should send them an outline for what we want our intros and outros to be like by the 14^th since they can clearly make high quality slides if given the proper time to do so. I will make sure we remember to give them that information hopefully by the 14^th or even earlier so we can get that quality.

 

That’s about everything I have to say about the presentations. I think especially for the first presentation of the class, everyone did phenomenally and should be proud, both of their presentation and their presenting. Let’s hope the A.I. presentation can be even better!