The Speaker
Maggie Little is founder and Director of Ethics Lab, the Francis J. McNamara, Jr. Chair of Philosophy, and a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, at Georgetown University. She is also a founding co-chair of the Tech and Society Initiative at Georgetown. Little oversees the growth of Ethics Lab’s work on campus, as well as among partners — from nonprofits to corporations to other academic institutions. She guides the focus of the Lab’s coursework on an annual basis, pushing her colleagues — and by extension, students — to examine the world’s most pressing, complex problems.
Experience
Giving a conference or a talk is always a challenge, but the more we are challenged, the more we have to practice. So after I do it many times, I’ll get experience in it. It is the same with many things in our lives. Speaking a foreign language is a matter of practice, practicing any sport, playing an instrument, making new friends, cooking, dancing, and so on.
What I see in this talk is that Dr. Little has a lot of experience in giving talks. I have seen many videos of her, and that is why I chose this video to talk about a good presentation. It’s true that this is similar to a TED talk, but what I find different is that it’s in a more academic setting.
He starts with an example of real life that grabs the attention of the students. Then, she develops the topic step by step. She starts giving simple arguments, but then she gives more elaborated ones.
I think she has a very good sense of movement on stage, she knows how to look at people – she even looks deep into the audience’s eyes – and she uses her hands and facial gestures to express herself.
I insist on the fact that she does not use any Power Point presentation. This is something that I really like. I think this is like 2000 years ago when people gathered in the “agoras” of Greek cities when people gathered to listen to speakers who had no visual aids and what attracted the audience was maybe their rhetoric and/or the topic they were talking about.
Preparation
Even if we can say that this talk was over-prepared, I think we can give Dr. Little credit for giving good talks.
She deals with very complicated topics in bioethics, and I think that her talks could be very controversial. But the way she talks motivates you to listen to everything she has to say to see how coherent she is. Even though I might not agree with some things, I think she makes very clear explanations of all the topics I have learned from her lectures.
The first think that called my attention is that she does not need any visual aid. Well, the format of the talk could be like a TED talk where she does not need any visual aid, but all the speakers I’ve seen in TED talks use any kind of visual aid. So I think that in this case there is good management of time, space, movement, the content, the relation with the public, the use of the voice, sight, and hands movement.
Fashion
I’d like to say that today talks, especially TED talks, are part of a new way of making shows and presenting ourselves in society (“presentación en Sociedad” in Spanish). I remember my mother telling me that in Colombia, when girls reach their 15th birthday, they were “presented in society” in a very important party to which they invite the mayor of the town, the priest, the head doctor, the head of the military or the police, among other personalities. for some people their presentations at conferences are like their “presentación en Sociedad”. It is the time to show our new clothes, shoes, tattoos, jewelry, earrings, hats, hairstyle, hair color, socks, etc. This is not good not bad, just that it is the time of their show for many academics.
In this case, Dr. Little is very well dressed and also introduces a way of speaking, of giving presentations.
So, this point of fashion is very subjective, and we should be aware of that, because we can judge the speakers for any of those external things and forgetting to concentrate on what is essential (this could also be essential). Many academics could be even more concentrated on these external things that in the content of their talks.
In the end, I would say that in this case of Dr Little’s talk, fashion helped her to make her talk grab the attention of the public.
