In my last post I spoke about the things I’ve been doing in order to either help with education or bring more awareness to people about the current state of web education and the talk I gave at Oxford Geek Night was particularly aimed at web design education within Universities. OGN is held fairly regularly and as well as two main keynotes of 15 mins each they also have four 5-minute microslots which can be volunteered for, which is what I did.

Having only ever previously spoken at a small Pecha Kucha night at Science Oxford to a small room of geeks it was a bit of a jump to the relatively large room above the Jericho Tavern jam-packed full of geeks! As this was pretty much the first time I’d done something like this I have to admit nerves got the better of me and I ended up stumbling through the 5-minute presentation I’d prepared with limited success, but fortunately I think my message got through just about.

As much as the nerves didn’t help I could have probably done a bit more preparation in order to make sure the talk felt more natural, I practiced a few times but as I was still trying to sort out the content it didn’t really lead to a very smooth talk. I also could have done a lot better in the way I kept my notes with me as I used my iPhone on the stage, which when I actually looked to it for help had locked and I had to spend a nervous second unlocking it and trying to get myself back on track. So overall not a great start to presenting but I’m hoping that I can learn from this and keep practicing and looking for some smaller speaking gigs to get some practice in.

It wasn’t all negative though, after the last of the talks I stayed in the bar for a bit with friends and did have a fair few people talk to me about what I presented on and many people were very enthusiastic about getting involved with education where they could and I got a lot of congratulations from the friends that were there so it’s definitely not something I’ll be giving up trying in the near future.