I was glad that we talked about the importance of identifying your audience during class today. I think one of the most important aspects of designing a workshop, presentation, paper, or anything that is to be presented to or made available to one or more "audience" members is to identify who that audience might be.
Obviously we cannot always know who our audience will be, but we can decide who our intended audience is. Doing so will aid you in preparing your presentation, but additionally if the presentation or workshop is elective it will allow you to frame your description in such a way as to hopefully attract people from your target audience. In other words if you are preparing an instructional workshop for internet searching you want to decide first whether the workshop will be aimed at teaching novices the basics, or if your workshop will be aimed at people who want to learn more complex search and retrieval skills. Not only would you structure your workshop very differently for each, but you would target different groups in your promotional materials for each workshop.
It helps me to think about my target audience in terms of individuals I know. If I am preparing to teach people who I would consider to be fairly tech savvy I may have my peers at SI in mind while preparing my presentation. Preparing a presentation for novices though perhaps less nerve-racking can, I find, be more difficult. This is due to the fact that information I likely take for-granted is in all likelihood new and unfamiliar to them. If I am preparing a presentation for a novice, I usually keep my mother in mind while preparing my presentation. My mother is an intelligent person, but she is not very comfortable with performing new tasks on a computer. She also very much wants each step laid out clearly and in detail, along with an explanation of why that task is being performed. Keeping her in mind while I work on my presentation forces me to consider each step from her perspective and thus, from the perspective of someone who does not have the background knowledge I have.
Obviously we cannot always know who our audience will be, but we can decide who our intended audience is. Doing so will aid you in preparing your presentation, but additionally if the presentation or workshop is elective it will allow you to frame your description in such a way as to hopefully attract people from your target audience. In other words if you are preparing an instructional workshop for internet searching you want to decide first whether the workshop will be aimed at teaching novices the basics, or if your workshop will be aimed at people who want to learn more complex search and retrieval skills. Not only would you structure your workshop very differently for each, but you would target different groups in your promotional materials for each workshop.
It helps me to think about my target audience in terms of individuals I know. If I am preparing to teach people who I would consider to be fairly tech savvy I may have my peers at SI in mind while preparing my presentation. Preparing a presentation for novices though perhaps less nerve-racking can, I find, be more difficult. This is due to the fact that information I likely take for-granted is in all likelihood new and unfamiliar to them. If I am preparing a presentation for a novice, I usually keep my mother in mind while preparing my presentation. My mother is an intelligent person, but she is not very comfortable with performing new tasks on a computer. She also very much wants each step laid out clearly and in detail, along with an explanation of why that task is being performed. Keeping her in mind while I work on my presentation forces me to consider each step from her perspective and thus, from the perspective of someone who does not have the background knowledge I have.
I found Kristin's tip of identifying your audience and making our delivery more personal to be one of the most helpful tips/take away from lecture this week. Speaking honestly, I hadn't even thought about the vocal performance aspect of the tutorial in my preliminary planning. However, after watching examples of good and bad tutorials in class, it is clear that it can make or break the screencast despite of the content. I find your tips really helpful as I begin identifying who my intended audience is. Especially how to tailor my presentation to my audience while not deterring others from using my screencast.
ReplyDeleteYour mother's approach to learning new computer skills reminds me of the "older adult" ladies I worked with at a credit union for about a year. I'd show one of them how to create and save a word doc, and then the next week she'd ask me again how to do, what was in my mind, the exact same process. But to her, these were two totally unrelated documents for different projects that had to be saved in different folders-- so the process must be different, too, right? Keeping the audience in mind is definitely important, not just so they won't click away and watch a different video instead, but so that they actually LEARN something. I haven't quite decided what skill I'll be teaching or who my intended audience will be, but I'll be keeping my credit union ladies in mind.
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