Effective Seminars - Nutrition - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Nutrition

Download Effective Seminars - Nutrition - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Nutrition in PDF only on Docsity! MECHANICS OF EFFECTIVE SEMINARS As senior nutrition students about to leave the academic bubble you have been under for 3 or so years, its time to play ball with the big boys. That’s what NUTR 481 is all about: to take your nutrition knowledge to a new level, to make a transition from a purely theoretical knowledge base to one that emphasizes practical insights and understandings. NUTR 481 is technically titled “seminar”. But, what is a seminar? The word sound like sermon, and that comes close to a definition. A seminar, however, is an oral presentation that instructs as well as informs a receptive audience of new research findings. A key here is the word new. Because it assumes by attending the audience has a keen interest in the topic, a seminar is a means of communicating your contributions in the way of new information to the advancement of the general knowledge of a field of research. So, a seminar is not a sermon, nor is it an academic lecture. Your audience most likely is knowledgeable and eager to hear your work. They will either agree or disagree with you. You are obligated, therefore, to give a clear presentation that focuses on facts. A key word here is facts which basically says the conclusions you make are supported by evidence, not opinion. Now, there may be some in the audience who have only a vague understanding of the area of the research. These people must not be overlooked. At the same time, you probably have professionals who know the theory, the jargon, the abbreviations and your previous work and just want to know what’s new. You must not let these people suffer through elementary explanations. So, you can see that a seminar is really an oral presentation that requires careful planning and forethought and mindful all the time of the audience in attendance. So your first lesson in giving a meaningful seminar is “Identify the audience to which you will be speaking and plan your delivery accordingly”. Since you will be center stage filling time with words, titles, pictures, figures and tables, you must be prepared to use your time wisely. A typical seminar will last about 50 minutes with 5 minutes left over for questions. The speaker may have between 20 and 40 slides. If you are told to give a 20 minute talk and choose 20 slides, you must adhere to a one minute per slide on average. Looking at slides and reading them silently in your mind may seem to go very fast, but its quite different when you present them orally. Time is spent by the interim between slides, adjusting to the information, thinking what you are going to say, adjusting the pointer, etc. In short, time goes by very quickly when you try to adhere to a one minute per slide presentation. Thus, to prepare for a seminar you should spend time orienting your thoughts, practicing with the pointer, memorizing the order, and more than anything else, reading the data out loud with the pointer and possibly a friend who can time your presentation. That way you will avoid a bell going off signifying 2 minutes remaining when you have 4 or more important slides to go. Should that happen, you are down to 30 seconds per slide and have lost that smooth delivery for a more panicked one. So, your second lesson in giving a meaningful seminar is “Rehearse your talk, take note of the time and never run past your allotted time”. So, now you are clipping along at one slide every 2 minutes or so. Stop and consider the following. Do I give my audience sufficient time to read the words, get oriented to the figures or tables, and get the gist of what I want them to know. When I show a table, can they grasp the meaning while I am distracting their personal study with my oral comments? Or, will they read and get ahead of me so I can fill in gaps and add to what they read. Obviously, the latter is preferable. In a seminar you can’t wait for your audience to catch up. You are doing them and yourself a disservice if your slides require lengthy reading as you would see in a publication. For figures the docsity.com audience will be spend time reading the title and grasping the Y and X axis legends, then looking at the figure. For tables, all those columns with headings, numbers, and title take time to grasp. Suppose my figure is a time study showing two sets of bar graphs at 0, 2,4,8,10,and 16 minutes. How long will it take the average person in the audience to read and digest all that information with me blaring in their other ear? Professor Valley at Boston University insisted that seminar speakers in his group prepare slides that contain no more than 7 items or7-10 words in a title, each figure had to have no more than 3-5 lines and each table 3 columns. This required quite a bit of editing, but it lead to seminars that were clear and well received by the audience. Following Dr. Valley’s lead, its important, therefore, to keep your slides simple, with only important information shown. So your next lesson for a meaningful presentation is “Don’t clutter up your slides with too much information that distracts, rather than informs” A seminar speaker is obligated to answer questions from an audience at the completion of the seminar. Sometimes this can be a moment of uneasiness for you. Its important that you respect all questions and make sure you understand the question before replying. Don’t ever answer a question with a question unless its to clarify your understanding. Replies such as “why do you want to know that” or “didn’t you hear what I said about …” are inappropriate and breach common courtesy. Some speakers treat audience questions as challenges to their ideas. It is rare to have a cantankerous questioner in the audience. But that’ not to say it won’t happen. More common, however, a person in asking a question or offering a comment is merely seeking clarification, adding supporting information, trying to remove information gaps or seeking out alternative interpretations to your data. Welcome these comments because they can be instructive to you and your audience without showing any judgmental error on anyone’s part. Indeed, questions from the audience more times than not are an opportunity to gain new insights and perspectives on the problem. In summary, Show respect for your audience if you want them to respect you. Finally, a list below summarizes 13 less important, but still valuable factors that will make you an effective seminar speaker. 1. Always thank your sponsor or the people who invited you to the seminar. 2. Use a title slide with 7 or fewer words to introduce your talk. Use 20 point font for most 3. Describe in your introduction the points that you will cover after introducing the problem 4. Never treat your pointer as a magic wan 5. Divide your talk into sections with a clear division between each section 6. Make your seminar a good narrative with a logical unfolding plot 7. Speak to the farthest person in the room 8. Maintain eye contact with your audience. Don’t talk to the slide. 9. Memorize cues that will help you know the order of the slides 10. At the end, prepare a summary slide with 7 or fewer words for each important point 11. Acknowledge those who assisted in the work (technicians, students, collaborators, etc.) 12. Thank you audience for their attention 13. Request questions from the floor and answer them in a respectful tone Examples of Effective and Not-so-effective Title and Summary Slides Title: The Ramifications of Vitamin E as an Antioxidant that Protects LDL Oxidation and Lowers the Depositing of Abnormally High Levels of Cholesterol in Tissues docsity.com