We discussed about how to generate questions when attending a presentation in Part 1 and Part 2. If you haven’t read this previous blogposts or need a refresher, click on the link.
Preparation On Both Sides
While preparing for the previous blogposts, I stumbled across several sources, all of them focusing on which questions to prepare for when presenting.
At first, I was focused on extracting the common pieces of information for the opposite side, aka preparing questions as the audience. Now that this has been discussed in Part 2 (and most likely in the future as I refine the Endless Question Generator), I thought about revisiting these sources and summarise the questions you definitely need to prepare as a presenter.
So let’s see what those questions are.
Questions Recommended to Prepare for
As the Endless Question Generator showed, there is a certain structure to the vast majority of questions you may face as a presenter. As indicated on some sources (https://tressacademic.com/audience-questions/), there are some questions you should prepare the answer for as they are likely to be asked.
What was the point? Remind the audience about the key points of your presentation and the reason it might interest them.
What’s next? Indicate what you intent to work on next, showcasing how live this project is.
How have you done this? This is asking for clarification on the methodology you followed in your work. Clarify it.
What do you mean by this? This is more a definition issue. Make sure that all terms are adequately chosen and clear for the intended use.
The best remains to rehearse your presentation with a colleague (or at least record yourself). I’m sure you’ll do well in your presentation.
Closing Words
And which questions do you usually prepare for or have faced in your experience?
With this blog going on for more than two weeks already, I thought to start another series, more technical.
Don’t get me wrong, I will carry on the daily blog, using ideas popping up during the day. After all this website is about presenting myself in a more open way rather than only through the prism of ideal image. However, I would also like to share about (interesting) projects that I work on.
In a sense, this aligns with the original purpose of this website, publishing and sharing about my work.
A Teaching Project
My teaching revolves around power engineering and control, and I’m always looking for ideas to improve the student’s experience and learning.
One of the effective teaching medium remains experimentation. The ability to test an assumption by yourself and observing the impact of our actions constitutes one of the most powerful learning tool. For this reason, engineering studies rely a lot on laboratories to teach engineering concepts.
They remain however very challenging to design since the right balance between difficulty, freedom to explore, and resource limits must be found. Missing the right mark often leads to the lab becoming ineffective, or even a waste of time. Make the objective of the lab too hard and the students will run out of time before learning much / Make it too easy and the intended new notion will feel too trivial to be learned. Write the lab assignment like a very precise recipe book and the students will just memorise the steps without developping the intended skills / Write it too loosely and the students (and even the demonstrators) will be completely lost. Use too much resources (e.g. purchasing expansive equipments or using too much staff time to design a tailored rig) will render the lab impractical to both create and maintain / Use too little resources and it will look too simple to be taken seriously.
I won’t claim to have cracked this balance, in fact far from it, but I’m keen to explore.
A Low-Voltage Motor Control Rig
The objective of this project consists in design a simple experiment to teach student about advanced motor control.
The characteristics of this rig must include:
Simple to design, build, and maintain
Safe to use by inexperienced users
Allows enough freedom to explore
Solutions to the above requirements could be:
Use off-the-shelf items from established companies, e.g. TI, Trinamic, Arduino
Focus on low-voltage (<50V) solutions
Use high-level programming language, e.g. Matlab or C/C++
This is a starting list. Let’s keep thinking and hopefully I will share an update on this project.
Closing Words
What do you think of this type of content for this blog? Do you have any suggestions for this project?
This is going to be a short post as it’s already late and tomorrow will be a long day as well.
This Part of the Education Cycle
Marking constitutes an inherent part of any teaching job, as much as exams are an inherent part of any students’ journey.
Exams are dreaded by students for the stress during the examination and the release (and consequences) of the resulting marks. Teachers also have to put a lot of efforts (aka time) into writing exam questions. Once the examination completed, the teachers will also spend a significant amount of time marking all these exam transcripts.
All in all, we all have to commit to exam and marking.
A Love Hate Relationship
I’m sure this is a feeling shared by many colleagues, but I’ve have a love-hate relationships with exams.
I like examining my students to measure (relatively quantitatively) how they have grown as skilled engineers. However, the volume of marking (easily 30min per transcripts and hundreds of them to mark) makes it a very daunting task…
To help me motivate myself to even start each mini marking sessions (it is unrealistic to mark everything at once), I usually keep picturing the curious and engaging students I have so much enjoying sharing knowledge and interacting during the course. Even if the transcripts are anonymous (which is an essential aspect of marking), my mind remains curious about how closer to a full engineer these students have become.
This means that I need to examine them. This means that I need to mark…
Closing Words
How do you tackle marking? Do you have any suggestions?
Forewords: this blogpost constitutes the continuation of this Part 1 on ‘Asking Questions at Presentations’. Feel free to read this introductory post first, which covers the motivation for these posts.
Shall I Dare to Ask?
First of all, there is no stupid question.
If something is obvious, it means that either the presentation or its context wasn’t explained clearly enough. Presentaterw assume a certain background from their audience and this can be often miscommunicated. A question about what may seem an obvious contextual point may in fact reveal a deeper misunderstanding by either the rest of the audience or the presenter themselves.
Furthermore, presenters are often way more stressed than their audience. Questions about their presentation is thus received as a confirmation that their presentation capture the attention of audience, transforming their ordeal into a worthwhile experience. You never know, a good question may even serve as an effective icebreaker for later conversation off the stage.
So take your chance!
But What to Ask?
Similarly to a lot of skills, training makes the answer to this question eventually more obvious.
The trick is to keep asking questions at every occasions (like my colleague suggested in Part 1) by using some box-standard questions like “Why have you chosen this methodology?” or “What is next in this project?”. Eventually, your ability to ask questions will sharpen and find more advanced and tailored questions to ask. Again the key message remains that, by aiming to ask at least one question, your attention to the content of the presentation is innatly enhanced and details or patterns will more naturally emerge.
But let’s see if I can help you with some starter questions first.
Looking for a Idea Generator
While searching for resources on online writing, I came across this very interesting concept: ‘the Endless Idea Generator’ (see picture below) from Ship30for30; a 30-day writing challenge with loads of tips about online writing. You can either follow their Twitter account or subscribe to their free newsletter from their website.
The neat concept here consists in mixing three categories: “What do you want to write about?”, “Proven approach”, and “Credibility”. As much as this is not going to make you win a Pullitzer prize, this is definitely a great starting point, especially when you are short on ideas or facing the dreaded writer’s block.
So this inspired me to create a similar framework about asking questions at presentations.
The Endless Question Generator
This framework (see picture below) aims to help in creating your first questions when none are coming to your mind in time.
The Endless Question Generator
You start with the classic five W-questions: What, Where, When, Why, hoW. The ‘What‘ question focuses on a detail of the presentation. The ‘Where‘ and ‘When‘ point towards location in space or time. The ‘Why‘ questions motivations and reasoning. The ‘How‘ is often associated with methodology.
Then you choose a Context or Theme. You could ask about the motives of the work, whether they are internal or external, or based on a starting point or end goal. Another theme revolves around the potential applications of this project; if they puzzle you or you have an idea about one, then enquire the presenter. Presentations also include a lot of definitions, sometimes clearly mentioned, often implied. If a term or concept is not clear to you, ask! Most likely half of the audience didn’t understand it either. Furthermore, if you know of similar works, you can ask for the viewpoint of the presenter about how they compare. Moreover, a project often uses data and a methodology to arrive at results or products, both of these points can be questionned either for their validity or how they have been chosen / implemented. Finally, you can enquire about the outcomes and what comes after this project. It can be in the form of future works after this project or the lessons learnt from this study.
Finally, your question can be angled with a reason of why you are asking it in the first place. These can range from the simplest reason where you need a clarification on a point mentioned (or not) during the presentation to sharing your knowledge on a similar work and wish to get the take from the presenter. A presentation may make sense on its own but could be hard to contextualise it in the wider context of how it connects with either other ongoing projects or its own start/end points. The methodology and results are always endless sources of (heated) discussions about which one is the most appropriate or the impact on the results one would get from the data or its influence on the collected data itself.
Remember, that preparing your questions (whether from this template or tailored to the presentation) will always pay off. So read about the presenter and advertised content beforehand, and pay attention to both the details and the big picture during the presentation. All these points will make you a better audience and position you in a better light with the presenter (or worse light if you intend to be controversial!), potentially leading to cooperation and more idea sharing.
Examples
[What/motivation/clarification] What motivated you to start this project?
[Why/definition/similar project] Why did you decide to define this term in this way when another project did it another way?
[Where/data acquisition/cooperation] Where did you acquire this data? We would like to use the same data, please.
[Who/future works/contextualise] Who will benefit from the outcome of this work?
[How/lesson learnt/clarification] How are you going to disseminate the learning from this project?
As you can see, there are an endless list of questions, which can be generated from this framework.
Going Further
Eventually, after training numerous times with this framework, you should be able to come up with your own questions; possibly graduating beyond the W-questions into W-less questions such as “Have you considered comparing your results with this particular study since the correlation A with B is less obvious here given that condition C is not longer present?”.
I’ve tried this fact sheet with project students during our weekly meeting and it turned out to be quite successful. This obvious still requires quite a bit of tuning, especially as this blogpost illustrates a sustantial amount of explanation is still needed beyond this simple picture. I’ll most likely post a Part 3 of this series when this framework reaches significant updates.
Closing Words
This post managed to start the creation of this guide on ‘Asking questions at a presentation’ by providing a framework on ‘which question to ask’. I will continue to experiment with this guide and come back here with updates.
Do you have any suggestions? Do you plan to use this question generator? If so, what was your experience? I’m looking forward to your feedbacks.
When I started this writing challenge 14 days ago, the main expectation was gradual improvements in exchange for daily grind for posts.
I’m not going to lie. On one hand, when the day comes to an end and the blogpost still needs to be written, my dread for opening the WordPress app and typing these words often takes physical form as it becomes so intense. On the other hand, I know that once the first few words have been laid down into the virtual draft system, the motivation for the post properly takes off, together with the length of the resulting post. This observation has already been covered in this post.
In a nutshell, my excitement for this writing challenge is only matched by the dread of the daily writing; seems like a healthy balance? ;p
But what about the improvements?
Well, these are, as expected, incremental.
First, it has only been 2 weeks, so any gains remain unstable and stopping – or even a short break – now would definitely erase them permanently. As much as there are claims for habits starting to form from 21/66/200/whatever number of days, I’m far from feeling this one from being solidly rooted yet. By the way, Prof Huberman does have yet another interesting podcast about habit forming. So my best bet consists in carrying on with this challenge. After all, I purposely didn’t set an end date or end point, since I consider this being a life-long challenge; just hopefully getting easier over time.
Improvements, for sure. Minor ones, indeed. Permanent gains, work in progress.
What to Look For Next?
On top of my mind, the two main improvements I’m aiming for now consists in writing these posts faster (ideally earlier in the day as well) and start working on the editing.
Advice and my own experience have demonstrated again and again that writing usually only produces a fraction of the quality of a final text. The real gem lies in the editing, which I’m honestly lacking. These blogposts are often written with little planning and on-the-fly editing. I suppose that writing experience does help at this point but better quality posts are yet to be unearthed by better editing yet. I suppose the first obstacle will be to face the guilt of reading one’s writing again. A step easy to confront by simply skipping this part of the full writing process.
One thing at a time, the first objective was to overcome the fear of writing; the fear of editing will come next.
Closing Words
What are you looking for in this blog? Do you have any pieces of advice on how it has been going so far and which direction to focus next?
