Virtual Worldwide Seminar Project

Fausto Giunchiglia's Comments as a speaker on his talk (11/4/98):

1. Giving a talk in a virtual seminar is a little harder than usual. The speaker must realize that his only way of communication is voice. This must affect the way he gives the talk and the way the slides are made. Before giving the talk I hadn't fully appreciated the consequences of this fact. The speaker should spend a little preparation time focusing just on this kind of things.
2. It is of course crucial that the slides are well done. Furthermore the speaker must be able to point to each (relevant) part of each slide in a very clear and concise way. Example sentences:

         ... second line ..
         ... top left hand side ...
         ... drawing on the left ...
   

   As you might have noticed in the second part of my talk (when I realized the consequences of not being able to point to things) I consistently used sentences like the above. As a minor consequence, slides should be pretty empty and with as little text as possible.

3. It is very useful to have the list of page numbers in each slide. It is also very useful for the speaker to know more or less to which slide each number corresponds. This helps him in case he wants to make a jump or to go back to a previous slide (this (to me) usually happens once-twice per talk) . As you might remember towards the end I jumped to slide 37. I jumped to the correct slide but this was mainly luck. One solution is that the speaker has a printed copy of the slides of his desk, or something similar. This will allow him to rapidly skim through them, not changing the web page being shown.