I just gave my first Skype presentation today, and it felt pretty strange.
The technical difficulties mostly arose with the sound. There were heavy echoes and so we ended up just cutting off the sound from the audience. This made it more difficult for me because I couldn’t gauge audience reaction. It was a real challenge to give a talk without being able to hear the laughter of the audience. (I asked them to wave their hands every time they laughed, but they didn’t do so–or else they were never laughing, which would be even worse.)
Next time I’ll use the telephone for at least one of the sound channels.
The visuals were ok from my side–I just went thru my slides one by one, using the cursor to point to things. I prefer standing next to the screen and pointing with my hands. But doing it this way was ok, considering.
The real visual problem went the other way: I couldn’t really see the audience. From the perspective of the little computer camera, everyone seemed far away and I couldn’t really sense their reactions. I wonder if next time it would be better to focus on just one or two people in the audience whom I could see clearly.
My overall feeling was that it was strange to give a talk in an isolation booth with no feedback. Also, the talk itself was a bit unusual for me in that very little of it was about my own research. It’s my own ideas (joint with Antony Unwin) but almost all the graphs are by others.
Maybe try using wireless headphones to listen to the audience and avoid feedback. Focusing on a couple of people does seem like a good idea.
I once gave such a conference talk for the annual meeting of the Iranian Statistical Society, using only Skype's audio and a remote controlled computer, as I could not get a visa in due time. It felt very strange in a kind of sensory deprivation way… Even though I could get and reply to questions from the audience. I am surprised you could not use visioconferencing instead, which works much better as you can handle several cameras, zoom on people, and so on. Is Kentucky that poor to have you give a Skype talk?!
That doesn't sound too different from my experience with teleconferencing back in 1992. The Internet makes the connection vastly cheaper, but lots of little annoyances remain, which is too bad because transportation is only going to make more expensive.
Hmmm…. This site doesn’t want to let me sign in… Maybe it’s because I’m from Kentucky. Obviously, the Skype decision was not financial, but convenience. Some readers clearly think Skype was not the best choice so how about some details on alternatives? The restriction is that the audience is in a typical 100 seat university classroom so equipment set up has to easy and portable. As for how it the talk went, it went great on our end. Student and faculty from various departments got to hear a great new talk from a well known statistician!
Arny Stromberg ([email protected])
Chair, Dept. of Statistics
University of Kentucky
Could you project your computer screen with a beamer? If it's bigger, it might be easier to focus on people to talk at.