Shallow Thoughts : tags : toastmasters

Toastmasters manuals I'd like to see: Speaking at Conferences

Now and then I idly exchange ideas with some Toastmasters friends about manuals we wish Toastmasters would offer. Sometimes we come up with "meta-manuals", projects which can be done by collecting projects from existing manuals.

Here's a manual I'd like to see. The projects are arranged in approximate order of difficulty and cover most of the skills needed by speakers at technical conferences. Each project includes suggestions for which existing Toastmasters manual could be used.

Speaking at Conferences

Projects:

1. Give a technical speech (15-20 min, longer if club schedule allows)
   Give a detailed talk on some technical aspect of your field, for specialists in the field. Use demos, slides and other visual aids effectively. Handle questions (and perhaps heckling) from the audience.
   (Speaking to Inform: any, or Technically Speaking: 1 or 4.)
2. Give a Lightning Talk (2-3 min)
   Give a short talk for the whole conference audience. Any topic related to the field: describe a project, teach a technique, generate enthusiasm, air a gripe.
   (Use the basic manual or Speaking to Inform, depending on subject.)
3. Give a beginner talk (15-20 min, longer if club schedule allows)
   Introduce your subject to beginners in the field, or outsiders who may not know much about it. Use visual aids and demos to create interest and explain the topic without using jargon.
   (Speaking to Inform: any, or Technically Speaking: 3.)
4. Give an Ignite talk (5 min)
   Give a five minute talk on any topic, using 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds, as described at ignite.oreilly.com.
   Pecha Kucha also counts.
   (Many choices, depending on subject.)
5. Give a keynote address (15-20 min, longer if club schedule allows)
   Give a speech suitable to be the keynote for a conference.
   (The Professional Speaker: 1, or basic manual: 9.)
6. Bonus project: Speak about speaking
   Explain to your audience how to give a good conference speech.
   (Speaking to Inform: 1-3, or Better Speaker: any.)
7. Update bonus project: Dealing with heckers
   Give a speech and have people in the audience try to disrupt your talk, interrupt, contradict or sidetrack you.
   (Public Relations has "Speaking under fire" but that's not really the same thing.)

Tags: speaking, toastmasters
[ 10:09 Oct 03, 2009    More speaking | permalink to this entry ]

A Table of Closed versus Open Formats

My last Toastmasters speech was on open formats: why you should use open formats rather than closed/proprietary ones and the risks of closed formats.

To make it clearer, I wanted to print out handouts people could take home summarizing some of the most common closed formats, along with open alternatives.

Surely there are lots of such tables on the web, I thought. I'll just find one and customize it a little for this specific audience.

To my surprise, I couldn't find a single one. Even openformats.org didn't have very much.

So I started one: Open vs. Closed Formats. It's far from complete, so I hope I'll continue to get contributions to flesh it out more.

And the talk? It went over very well, and people appreciated the handout. There's a limit to how much information you can get across in under ten minutes, but I think I got the point across. The talk itself, such as it is, is here: Open up!

Tags: tech, formats, open source, toastmasters
[ 10:37 Jun 12, 2009    More tech | permalink to this entry ]

Review of Toastmasters manuals

With all the zillions of Toastmasters club web pages, very few people seem to write about them. A conversation in our club today about the advanced manuals made me realize that I'd never seen a review of the various Toastmasters advanced manuals -- which ones are useful, which ones are fun, which ones are poorly written or contain gotchas that makes it hard to complete their projects?

So I wrote one: a Review of Toastmasters manuals.

Tags: speaking, toastmasters
[ 20:16 Mar 06, 2008    More speaking | permalink to this entry ]