The typical conference, university lecture or IT security training: someone stands up front with a prepared PowerPoint presentation and has lost the attention of their audience after 5 minutes. The hallmark of a frontal lecture? One person talks, the rest sleep, sit on their laptops or look worriedly at their phones' soon-to-be-empty batteries.
As a student, you are tormented with boring lectures, later at continuing education events with five days of frontal lecturing in a row, and if you attend a conference voluntarily, you have to put up with 80% speakers who would have been better off staying at home. The audience thanks them out of professional politeness and thinks - why are we here? What was he trying to say now? Whether the next one will be better?
There are exceptions. Some thrilled me, e.g.:
- Dr. S. Paulus (lectures at the Technische Hochschule Brandenburg)
- C. Schäfer (data protection talk at the TISP Community Meeting 2016)
- A. Alsbih (OWASP Germany Day 2014)
The hallmark of these lecturers and their talks: interaction with the audience, humour, charisma and/or didactic skills. But above all: no boring frontal lecture or frontal teaching.
Honestly, giving a good talk or training is not easy. I once read a statement in a specialist book on didactics that, in the first development phase of a lecturer, the main fear of the audience is the most formative part of the talk, so that one takes refuge in detail-rich slides. Paraphrased. The statement has a kernel of truth.
I gave my first talk in front of an audience several years ago in the final years of high school. It was a talk given together with other students in the school hall as part of a business project run by one of the Big4 audit firms. By the standards of the time, the slides were very good, my delivery miserable - I had learned my text by heart. A disaster as soon as you stumble for a moment or someone asks an interim question. Since then, I have never again thought out or prepared text blocks in advance, not even vaguely.
Since then I have nevertheless kept giving talks. I learned from my own mistakes, learned from the mistakes of other speakers and integrated other people's good ideas into my own style. Currently I am an adjunct lecturer at universities of applied sciences, I was a lecturer in an IHK (chamber of commerce and industry) course, I run trainings and workshops and I am also happy to give a talk at a conference. It all sounds fine and important, but even with this experience not everything turns out well. Being too fast is probably the number one criticism of me. I am trying to work on it.
What are the success factors of a good talk, training or lecture? In my opinion:
- Humour and wit do not hurt. Taking yourself too seriously does.
- Too many slides with too much text - or even just keywords - is the fundamentally wrong approach. The participants can read books themselves.
- A picture says more than 1000 words. There are cheap image databases.
- Interaction with the audience. Did I already mention interaction with the audience? Yes, right? Interaction with the audience!
- Theory is learned through? Practice! Exercises, role play.. really, role play? Yes!
- Cramming as a concept is no advantage (regards to the CISSP preparation courses). It is a waste of time.
- Conveying experience beats reciting theory.
- What is better than interaction with the audience? Even more interaction!
And one final piece of advice: do feedback rounds - if possible. A mad idea, right? Asking somebody for critical feedback. Feedback forms are nice.. honest, harsh and direct feedback is better. Provided you have strength of character and the ability to take criticism.