Doing an Ignite presentation

I will be going to IFLA in August and attending the summit organized by the Section on Education and Training (SET). The theme of the summit is “Library and information education and training: Confluence of past and present toward a strong future”, and at the summit a series of Ignite presentations will be given. I’m one of the presenters, and my Ignite presentation will focus on my vision of LIS education in 2015, which I talked about in one previous post.

Using the Ignite talk format, speakers present a topic using 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds. According to Wikipedia, “Ignite is the name for a particular type of event that is held throughout the world—organized by volunteers—at which participants speak about their ideas and personal or professional passions according to a specific format. The event holds the motto, “Enlighten us, but make it quick!” Anyone can throw an Ignite event. The presentations are meant to “ignite” the audience on a subject, whereby awareness, thought, and action are generated on the subjects presented.” As I was preparing for my presentation, I found this Ignite talk about successfully giving an Ignite talk, which really helped an Ignite newbie like me better understand the process.

One of the things that make me feel a bit nervous about the Ignite format is the fact that the slides are auto-advanced. This means presenters will have to time the presentation really well in order not to go off the slide. This is different from all the other presentations I have done before, for which I have full control of the advancement of slides. Looks like for the Ignite presentation, I will need to create a script and practice it several times to create a seamless match between my talk and the slides.

Though a bit nervous, I do look forward to it. I think this could be an interesting format our PhD students may use to share their research with us during the residencies. If one can “ignite” the audience on the topic of his/her thesis research in a five-min talk, he/she is either a grand master of public speaking, or is truly onto something groundbreaking.