I’m back from a conference, as usual with mixed feelings. Taking a break from admin work and students to focus on sharing ideas with academic peers is always refreshing, much more so when each day ends with dinner in good company and in a beautiful town, as was the case. Yet, inevitably I wonder why we keep on using the same format when it’s obvious that it needs serious improvement, even when the conference itself is well organised as this one was.
I always think of students when listening to my peers delivering papers (and when preparing my own contributions). A standard paper lasts for 20 minutes, sessions usually include three papers (= 60 minutes) and the rest of the 90 minutes of each session is ideally taken up by debate. More often than it is desirable these 90 minutes seem endless, this is why I think of students putting up with lectures of similar duration each day –and not just for three days maybe twice a year. The complaints we have been voicing over coffee are repeated from conference to conference: delegates don’t rehearse their papers in advance, take too much time, mumble the text to themselves, use PowerPoint badly…
Just let me add a few examples. A delegate used 30 minutes instead of 20 despite the desperate warnings of the polite chair and when he finally stopped his comment was that he still had 4 more pages to go… Another one insisted on speaking with the window open and the loud noise of the cars on the motorway outside overlapping her (unintelligible) words for fear that the air conditioning was not on (it was!). Another delegate simply could not manage to make her PowerPoint occupy the full screen and we had to interrupt and teach her how to do it –when the slides became visible we were dismayed to see they contained large chunks in thick print of the paper she was delivering.
I have nothing against reading from papers and using PowerPoint. I tend to be quite nervous before an audience of my peers and prefer using well-rehearsed props to doing a presentation based on notes (or slides). I did that once, was terribly anxious and vowed never to do it again. Students might not believe it but there’s an enormous difference between a lecture/seminar and a conference paper, which has to do with how relaxed you feel before the audience.
What always baffles me is how much some speakers contribute to killing their own papers by failing to adapt them to the requirements of the situation, which simply begs for face-to-face communication strategies. I never ceased to be amazed by the fact that if I can’t connect with a speaker’s style of delivery from the first sentence I may very well not understand a single word in 20 minutes. My brain just switches off. Sorry to sound so smug but I can’t help wondering what kind of teacher some of my colleagues are when I see them boycotting their own papers in conferences.
The safest thing to do, in my modest opinion, is to start from the idea that the audience will be bored to death with your paper and then think of ways to make it more attractive. Make your sentences short, speak loud and clear, look at the audience, use images and not words for the PowerPoint, throw in a bit of humour, make your body language show you do care for their attention… –all those things our students demand and expect from us. After all, aren’t we supposed to be professional communicators?
Having said that, I did enjoy very much the debate time in each session, which makes me wonder whether we could do away with papers and simply talk to each other, perhaps have a gigantic three-day coffee break. I keep on telling myself that’s the conference I want to organise… One day I’ll do it, promise.