Five golden rules for a boring presentation

I just returned from this year's Adaptive Hypermedia conference which left me with a bitter-sweet taste after watching all those presentations from a variety of speakers.

On one side, we had some excellent presentations, like two of the keynote speeches: John Riedl's "Altruism, Slefishness and Destructiveness on the Social Web" and Jan Borchers' "Sweet Spots and Baroque Technologies", which were extremely interesting and they kept us wanting more and more.

On the other side, once again we find the majority of presentations, which..yes you guessed it right...they were BORING!
While constantly looking for ways to stay awake, like playing with my iPhone or checking out up-coming cinema movies, i was wondering: "How is it possible, these people to be SO bad in presenting when their work was (most of the time) worth listening and taking into account?"

Well i watched so many of them, and got sooo bored, which resulted in writing this post to express.... my 5 golden rules for a boring presentation:

1) Overload your slides with more information than the audience can digest: It may be hard, but keep adding stuff to your slides until you have covered the whole area of the slide. If you are using pictures, make sure to be small enough so people sitting at the back of the room will not be able to see them. That will also allow you to add more text on the slides!

2) Read word-by-word the content of your slides: Yes that's right. All you have to do is read everything that is on your slides. Don't care if the audience can read it by themselves. I am sure they will fully understand it if you spoon-feed the content to them.

3) Don’t be exciting about what you are presenting: Your mission is to trick your audience into falling asleep while listening to you. Be prepared, that some of them would have slept well on the night before so you may need to give your best if you want to achieve this. But don't worry, the majority of the audience would propably had some drinks during the previous day's excursion and they will not put a fight for staying awake.

4) Talking about your work is better than demonstrating it: Who cares about demos or examples of your work? Talking about it is much better. Demos will drive the audience crazy where listening to you is much more fascinating. If you up for it, try avoiding commas or even full stops. Keep it flowing non-stop, and try to combine it with the 3rd goal for even better results.

5) Assume your audience knows what you are talking about: Assume your work is self-explanatory and simple for everyone to understand! If they don't know your work or if they don't get it, it's their fault! Do not assume, the audience needs guidance and do not put yourself in their shoes. If you understand what you are talking about, that means they get it too.

To conclude on a more serious note, i would like to refer to Dr Dave Millard's seminar "The New Web Literacy" as an example of someone who did NOT follow any of my golden rules, resulting in a failed attempt to deliver a boring presentation...I encourage you to go and have a look. Trust me you will not regret it!

Standardize the problems before standardizing the solutions

I am currently attending the Adaptive Hypermedia 2008 conference which is being held in Hannover, Germany.
Today i participated in the User Model Integration Workshop where some interesting presentations and discussion took place.

The main theme around all presentations was the argument of centralised vs distributed user models. Which one should we adopt and why? pros and cons of each one were presented as speakers took turns in supporting one or the other.
What i found interesting was the presentation of Peter Brusilovsky who emphasized, as it stands now, how long is the road on achieving interoperability across the entire web. He made it clear that among peer systems, the centralised approach works perfectly, by having a common ontology and keeping universal common models. But he concluded that the big picture requires a decentralised approach, since various models for every user are located in systems with different data models among them.

The workshop concluded with a discussion where some interesting opinions were heard.
The participants agreed that re-usability of ontologies must be preferred instead of every one creating his/her own every time. Altough, we understand, agreeing on ONE universal ontology is far from realistic, up to 3-4 ontologies should be something we could achieve in order to accomplish a desired Lingua Franca state among the user modelling community.
Furthermore, user modelling standards, like LOM, LIP and PAPI, appear to fade away, since developers just don't care any more how they gather user information as long they manage it and keep their users happy while doing it.

Something that i really found interesting is the lack of consideration for scrutability and privacy issues from most of the workshop presenters. Only one student, whose supervisor is Judy Kay, the driving force for scrutability in user modelling, presented a scrutable solution which allows users to inspect and alter the way they are being modelled. I am glad that my PhD is not only focusing on interoperability, but also shows how we can add a 'scrutable touch' on our implementations while keeping in mind privacy of user information as well.

Another point that worths mentioning, is the fact that no-one is thinking outside the educational domain. All presented solutions were for achieving interoperability inside the educational domain only...But how about the social networking domain, e.g. Facebook, MySpace, etc.? How about the e-business domain, e.g. Amazon, eBay, etc.? That is another contribution that i think my PhD is bringing to the community.

Finally, every single one implementation presented was following a common (popular) approach: RDF or OWL to describe ontologies, which i agree, and Web Services for systems to communicate and exchange user information between them, which i don't fully agree. Why use such an 'advance solution' when a simpler one that fits the same purpose is available. The RESTful approach is covering its ground against SOAP-based implementations. Facebook, Google's OpenSocial, Amazon and eBay are all providing RESTful APIs. So why don't we as well?

I think the right questions were being asked today and a common understanding of various existing problems which we are facing has been developed. So why don't we build an ontology to map all these identified problems before every one of us goes away and attempts to solve them in their own diverse way? I mean...where we all agree is when identifying these problems; where we disagree is how we should go about solving these problems. Maybe what we should do, is standardize the problems before wondering why we don't have standardized solutions...