Giving a talk, and I need some help

[redacted]

Gas and depth/dive profile planning, especially as pertains to going beyond known features of a cave.

 

[Superlyte27]

Gas and depth/dive profile planning, especially as pertains to going beyond known features of a cave.

If they needed a nap, they should have stayed home.

 

[Sas]

Most people I know seem to be interested in the following about cave diving in this order:

-how dangerous it is (things like narcosis or how one might get the bends, how you can find your way out)
-what there is to see
-the rules of cave diving
-what training involves (not in specific detail but more general)

 

[pafindr]

Needing to learn that you can't use "standard" flutter kicks and frog kicks because of silting.
Also adding what the potential cost for cave diving comes to. Explaining that it costs X amount to band your tanks, having spools, can light, etc

 

[Cave Diver]

Lynne, something else you might consider doing is having your gear set up and standing on a table, complete with can light, reel, etc. and with a standard jacket BC rig for comparison and go over some of the differences.

 

[Mike Boswell]

I dive to see animals and plants and corals. I do appreciate the beauty of rock formations (stalagmites, etc.), but beyond that I just don't really "get" the appeal that caves - on the surface or underwater - have for some people.

So, as a non-cave diver, what I would most like to hear and see is - Why do you love caves? What is the attraction? What am I missing?

 

[Diver0001]

I honestly don't believe that I have ever DIR chest-thumped, here or anywhere else. I may talk about cave gear setup, but it's pretty uniform for back-mounted divers. I will talk about training, but only in a very general sense. It would be rather hypocritical of me to turn my talk into a DIR brainwashing session, since two of my three cave cards aren't from DIR organizations.

PM sent. I was trying to encapsulate a different thought into that that how it came across. My bad.

R..

 

[vladimir]

I've done many presentations to the non diving public. Do it Power Point

I am sure that your and Lynne's presentation skills are much better than the government lawyer's whose Powerpoint presentation I had to endure a couple of weeks ago, but I have sat through too many lousy seminars, etc., where somebody shows slides and then reads the slides aloud, expanding beyond the displayed text only minimally. Powerpoint is a good tool to integrate photos and video into a presentation (which is what you're suggesting, I know--let me rant), but just leave the text out--completely.[/rant]

Lynne, something else you might consider doing is having your gear set up and standing on a table, complete with can light, reel, etc. and with a standard jacket BC rig for comparison and go over some of the differences.

This is a good idea, I think. Most divers have some affection for the gear, after all. Cooler gear, that actually serves a purpose, should go over well.

 

[miketsp]

..snip..
Keep the presentation to 50 min (about 80 slides)

I couldn't help smiling at this one. By current standards that's a lot of slides per minute.
Although I have delivered presentations in the past of up to 150 slides (mainly when there was a lot of technical content - or the presentation is intended to be used independently as a self-training aid) all the presentation courses I've done over the last few years (where I work we're obliged to recycle) insist on the use of fewer and fewer slides.
The presenter is then supposed to talk around these few slides and show competence.
If the slides are not going to be distributed to the audience (normally true for public sessions) and there is is going to be a Q&A session then I normally include at the end of the presentation a fairly large backup section with slides on all the expected topics.
So when you get a question from the audience and can immediately pull up a relevant slide it makes you look competent and prepared.
It helps create empathy.

 

[Diver0001]

In my experience, most presentations get too time-bound, too unwieldy and too long if you present more than about 20 slides in TOTAL and/or at a tempo higher than about one slide every 2 min.

There's nothing worse than watching a presentation where someone flips through slides at high tempo, reads one or two things from each slide to you and then at the end says "don't worry, I'll send it to you in email".

A good presentation will be your story... with a few slides to illustrate visually what you're talking about. Don't let the slides become the centre point of the presentation. IJS.

For a 20 min presentation, make it fit on 10 slides. That's not a rule, but more of a rule of thumb that gives you an initial aiming at the sweet spot. Make a 10 slide presentation and then dial in from there.

Also, I think 20 minutes is too short for a presentation of this nature. You're going to need about an hour.

R..