At the beginning of March, I interviewed a professional
working in the Higher Education sector as part of the TW5212 module. Based on
that interview, I was required to produce both a presentation and a written
report of my findings. Having submitted both parts of the assignment this week,
I feel now is an appropriate time to reflect on what I learned during the
process.
When the interview was complete, I had a decision to make as
to whether I would work on the presentation or the report first. I approached
this dilemma with the mindset that the slideshow was going to be a summation of
the report. As such, I decided the best route was to focus on the write-up. I
believe this was the right choice. When I finished the report, I found it a
relatively straight-forward process to adapt the material for a presentation.
Going forward, this is the approach I will take if I need to produce
presentations based on my research.
The main takeaway from this assignment for me was the skill
of adapting content to a different medium. At first, I was concerned that my
presentation was merely repeating the work in my report. It took some time
before I realised that this was not necessarily a bad thing. A slideshow is a
much different delivery method than a long-form written report. Learning to condense
my findings into an easily digestible seven-minute presentation will doubtless
be a useful technique of which to have experience.
Another important aspect of this project was gaining
experience in recording a voiceover in Microsoft’s PowerPoint software. Before
this work, I had only ever recorded narration using Audacity. However, we were required
to synchronise our audio with the presentation, so it was necessary to use
PowerPoint’s built-in features. At first, I found this to be a difficult task.
I found the interface to be somewhat unintuitive. Initially, I didn’t realise
that it was possible to record narration for each slide individually. I made
several attempts to record the entire presentation at once, which resulted in
mistakes and an overall low-quality result. When I figured out that the program
would seamlessly knit individual clips together, the process became more
manageable.
I still feel there are significant limitations to the tool’s
set of features for this purpose. The inability to edit the recordings for a slide
often results in the need to re-record an entire segment if you make an error
or need to remove silence. This problem can be frustrating, especially to someone
accustomed to having access to a broader range of tools. Further, the estimated
total length of the final output video can be inconsistent if you include slide
transitions in your presentation. The time these transitions take is not
included in the figure the software presents you with before you export the
video. Only after the video has been generated can you determine the correct length.
This limitation is not ideal if you have a strict time limit to which to adhere.
However, these problems aside, I believe completing this
work was beneficial in terms of developing my skillset. While recording a voiceover
in PowerPoint would not be my preferred option in the future, it is reassuring
to know that if I need to produce a video presentation, I now know the
technique required. I also feel that this assignment has made me more confident
in my ability to adapt information to various formats, something which is a vital
aspect of technical communication today.
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