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PUBLIC SPEAKING DVD

Featured ATL Patron
Christopher R. Moylan
Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Laboratories
Department of Chemistry

Project Description

I wanted to use a bunch of video clips to illustrate both how-to and how-not-to points regarding public speaking. These clips are to be used in a lecture given to first-year chemistry graduate students as part of their three-day intensive Teaching Assistant Training program.

I had a wide variety of VHS videocassettes of varying quality, and I had gone through them to find where the desired clips were. But I had no background in any of the technology used to select clips and dub them down digitally. I don't even own a DVD player at home. So I needed a lot of help.

The Process

The ATL staff treated me with great patience, and taught me to do as much of the work as possible with no previous background. On something as time-consuming as this, it's a relief to be shown how to do it oneself but to have the coach available if one gets stuck. It did take several sessions, two of which were several hours each, plus the work that the ATL staff did behind the scenes to fix the sound and sync problems on the Wonder Years videotapes that I had obtained. I was particularly proud that based on Kimberly Hayworth's instruction, I was able to construct that 30-second montage of 18 two-second game show clips plus the concluding excerpt from Ghostbusters. When it was played live it got a great response.

The Outcome

The entire DVD presentation was instrumental to my talk, and my talk was one of the most highly rated sessions of the entire program, according to the student evaluations. Public Speaking was actually the most popular training-related session. Here are some quotations from the feedback forms that I believe were specifically influenced by the DVD that was made at the ATL:

"It was perhaps the most entertaining training session I have been involved in."

"It is obvious that many people have worked hard on putting this together."

"Intro to Public Speaking--fun and interesting to listen to."

"Sexual harassment policy--it was a little dry after Chris's lecture on public speaking."

There were other positive comments, but these in particular I think were influenced by the visual aid that was used. The talk itself violated one of the rules of the talk, in that it included many more subjects than should normally be included in an hour. Having video to illustrate allowed me to blast through each of these tidbits in a way that didn't rattle or bore the audience.

Lessons Learned

The main lesson I learned from the experience were capabilities that the ATL has that I wouldn't have known about, like the ability to salvage what appeared to be unusable Wonder Years clips and to fix video/audio synchronization problems. I look forward to learning about more options available that can enhance the courses that I teach.

Future Projects at the ATL

The Public Speaking lecture will absolutely be given next year, so the DVD we made should be usable for many years to come. Based on this experience, it occurs to me that I may in future want to get live demonstrations videotaped, so I can come over to ATL and get them made into DVD files, and then put them on CourseWork so that students can just run a video clip from their computers to see how a lab procedure should look.