One of my biggest pet peeves is people reading from a Powerpoint slideshow when giving a presentation.
The powerpoint slide show is to guide your audience about what YOU are presenting, speaking about. It should NOT convey all the information nor should it be YOUR (The speakers) guide or prompter.
Ideally, the speaker should “know” the topic and speak from his/her mind and allow the bullet points/diagrams to connect what you are talking about.
It is quite irritating that the speaker turns away from the audience to look at the screen to gather his/her thoughts or determine what to talk about next. For the love of the audience, stop referring to the screen and look at the audience when you are talking to them.
It’s a bit late but I’ll still give my take on day 2.
Frankly, I was disappointed by Day 2. The sessions started off late as it did on Saturday but that was okay I guess. During the introduction, a lot of speakers came forward to announce what they would be talking about and frankly, I thought that it exceeded the possible time constraints as well as the space constraints. But well if it could happen, good for everyone.
The bloggers collective as expected (by me) had a large number of talks. I was skeptical about accommodating so many talks partly because the collective tended to not fragment into those interested in particular topics and not others (As in, if 2 speakers wanted to talk about different topics at the same time, they could not so that the audience does not get split). I was supposed to give a talk on micro-blogging as well.
However, once the talks started, things started getting messy because the talks would overflow and not all the talks had been alloted a time slot (including mine) I did listen to a couple of nice talks like moblogging, securing your images from being downloaded. I tried to attend a talk on Semantic web and moving towards an Internet with all data related semantically. But unfortunately I reached late so missed a significant bit of the talk.
The highlight of the day for me was a very nice discussion on bloggers getting a chance to have their posts published in the print medium to reach a wider audience. And another nice discussion with Arun Ram during lunch(it ranged from phone comparisons to egos of popular bloggers, Techcrunch, Robert Scobel etc)
Anyway, overall I felt that day 2 was fairly underwhelming for me.
Ps. The campus at IIM is gorgeous :)
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Thus speaketh