I recently attended iConference 2012 in Toronto. It was my first academic conference and a refreshing change from the industry conferences I have attended. At the iConference, no one was selling anything and it was a big information-sharing extravaganza. The presentations were plentiful and I was rather surprised to see so many presenters reading their papers as opposed to presenting on the topic. This made things a little drier than i was hoping for (I even had someone next to me napping during the keynote by Geoffrey Nunberg).

However, there was one presentation, titled Metadatapedia: A proposal for aggregating metadata on data archiving, that really stood out. The presenters, David Nichols and Michael Twidale, delivered a presentation unlike the others. One would begin presenting, then the other would interject with a rude, semi-crass, pointed question that would challenge what the presenter was delivering. When this first happened, I was not quite sure what to think. As the presentation progressed, so did this style. The result was a very memorable and powerful presentation.

This got me thinking about my own (questionable) presentation skills and what I could do ‘outside the box’ that would make a memorable presentation. Continued…