Jorge Guerra Blog #2: Reflection on the A.I. Presentations

 

Hello again! I am Jorge Guerra and I shall be discussing the A.I. presentations. Like last time I will go through each group, discussing what I think each group did well in their presentations. Then I will discuss how each group did with presenting, mentioning a few people by name. Once I have gone over the groups I will discuss the class leaders, then how I felt about the presentations as a whole. Before I begin, I will be mentioning things I believe could have been done differently but I will only do so with the intention of being helpful and I overall believe the presentations for all three groups are better than the previous presentations.

 

Group 3 covered Social Life and Potential Careers. First, their presentation has a uniform background throughout which makes the presentation feel consistent. The title slide is very pretty and the intros to each section look great. The images used in the presentation convey the information they are trying to say in each slide well and after checking there is only one very minor instance of an image overlapping with the text, so minor I don’t think anyone would notice unless like me they were intentionally looking for it. On a related note, I think for most of the slides the balancing of text to images is perfect as it rarely felt like there was too much text or too many images in any individual slide. I will say though that a few slides could have done with a bit less text and I noticed that the works cited page sometimes only had a singular source for a whole slide which I feel could have been condensed into a few slides. Besides that, I think the presentation was wonderful. As for the presenting itself, everyone did a great job conveying the point of their slides without going on for too long. From cross-referencing my own notes and the slides I can see the parts where the presenters talked about what was not directly shown in the slides, which clearly shows everyone planned properly and were able to (mostly) avoid just reading off the slides. I especially think Tatiana did a wonderful job clearly conveying her points, showcasing the strengths of group 3s presentation. Overall, group 3 did wonderfully.

 

Group 2 which is my group covered Economics and Mental Health. While our group did not have a uniform background, we did mostly follow a technology theming, both for the backgrounds and our images. This means that our presentation and the slides within do feel cohesive with each other even with the constantly changing backgrounds. The way we went about covering our topics and the sources we used in my opinion were great. I will also use the advantage of actually being in this group to say that our coordination during the making of this presentation was spectacular, allowing us to cover mostly everything we wanted to. I will say that a lot of our slides are mostly text and a lot of that text is in colors that don’t contrast well with the background they are in. My own slides are not free of problems though I will say that I didn’t have a lot of time to dedicate to this project as I was very busy at the time which is why so many of my slides are mostly text especially my third slide. The two slides I made for the AI day presentation are more like how I would have made the slides for the main presentation though I am not trying to make excuses for myself. Presenting wise I feel we mostly spoke clearly with only a few awkward pauses and we managed to elaborate on what the presentation was showing rather than just speaking off the slides. I will call out Lisa and Jonathan for being the MVPs (most valuable player) of this presentation as they were the ones who most helped coordinate everyone and communicated our questions to the class leaders. I think in my very biased opinion that our presentation was fantastic.

 

Group 1 covered Education and Sports. Both due to not wanting to be a broken record and wanting to cover more of the specifics for this presentation, I will only briefly mention that this presentation has a consistent theme with most of the backgrounds being various shades of blue and most of the images looked like they belonged in the section they were in. Many of the slides in this presentation have a lot of text but unlike the other two presentations for the most part I actually think this presentation manages large volumes of text well. Organizing bodies of the text into sections I think can make slides seem less wordy. For instance, slide 9 is only words but separating them into eight circles makes the lack of images not really noticeable. Other slides such as 21, 32, and 40 similarly show how even with few to no images a slide can still come across as well balanced in terms of text. The works cited pages reuse the same image but it actually works as it makes it feel like the words cited slides are continuations of one another rather than completely different slides which given what works cited pages are supposed to be makes them feel consistent. I really liked slide 36 which was Denisse’s interview questions and answers as they were color-coded which made it clear who is talking and the use of a baseball card to showcase Michel Triana (the person Denisse interviewed) is very fitting and makes the whole slide stand out in quality. As for the presenting I think everyone did a great job, some peoples segments felt incredibly short and others felt a bit long but overall, I think the group was able to get their points across in a clear manner.

 

Now we can move on to the class leaders. The intros for two of the presentations clearly communicated what each presentation would be about while all the outros summarized everything we went over in the body of the presentations. I do think the intro and outro for group 2 should have had a bit more as compared to the very visually interesting intros and outros of groups 1 and 3, 2s kind of feels like blocks of text. This especially applies for the intro to group 2 as it only introduces the people who are presenting along with the sections they are presenting, rather than actually introducing an audience to the subjects we were covering. Outside of that relatively minor issue though, I feel like the class leaders did a great job!

 

I think all the groups did a wonderful job with the presentations and presenting. In retrospect though I feel like the biggest strengths of our presentations are more visible in the AI day presentations then the basic ones. The more condensed format forced us to make our presentations and presenting more concise which I feel helped make them better. Just looking at my slides for the normal presentation compared to the AI day presentation and you can see that the latter both looks better, makes better use of the limited space available, and gets my central points across clearly in half the slides. This applies to most of the slides in the AI day presentation, making it feel like the definitive version of the AI presentations.

 

Overall, I felt this was a very enjoyable subject to learn and I look forward to whatever the persuasion topic has to offer. Goodbye and have a wonderful day!