I’ll admit it: I actually don’t like public speaking very much. I’m always afraid I’ll forget half of what I’m supposed to say and spend half my time slack jawed from having run out of things to say. That whole thing about imagining the audience naked doesn’t work. (Ladies, in case you didn’t realize this: guys do that all the time anyway.) It’s just something that makes me a bit nervous, and while I don’t let it stop me, it’s a reality I have to face.

But now I’ve found a really fun exception: Speed geeking. It’s a cross between speed dating and geeking out that involves giving the same incredibly short presentation to rotating small groups of listeners. In today’s Open Educational Project Showcase, the second session of the Summit’s Education track, I was one of ten presenters who gave the same brief presentation to small groups ten times in a row. It was like practicing and presenting rolled into one! And with the groups being small, it wasn’t intimidating even though the overall effect was to speak to the same number of people the same amount of time.

The first time I gave my spiel, sure it was a bit rough. But I was certainly able to fill three minutes with ease, and answer those few questions my listeners had the chance to get out.

Hi, I’m Steve Foerster, and I’m with WikiEducator. We’re a project sponsored by the Commonwealth of Learning, which is an international NGO funded by member states of the Commonwealth of Nations. Essentially, if the Commonwealth of Nations had a Ministry of Education, it would be the Commonwealth of Learning.

WikiEducator is, as the name suggests, a wiki that is used to create and modify open educational resources, or “OERs”. We use the same wiki software as Wikipedia, but our implementation is slightly different.

Et cetera. It was also nice that my tendency to speak too quickly when nervous translated into an advantage in the speedgeeking format.

By the third go around I had it down pat. The only time I had a serious brain stoppage was when one of the other participants was recording me. In fact I think my jet lagged brain shut down in mid-sentence. Ah well. At least it picked back up after a short time. I suppose those few seconds meant that one less question was able to be asked, but that just comes with the speed geeking territory.

By the end I was left with a dry mouth and the last group had a sort of glazed expression, as if to say, “We don’t care, but it’s not you, it’s that we just hear nine other rapid fire presentations.” But I’ll admit it, I finally had fun with public speaking

tags: Dubrovnik Croatia education summit07

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