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Pre-talking
By Jason D Lotay, on 17 November 2014
We have instigated a new idea at the KCL/UCL Geometry Seminar – the “pre-talk”.
It’s well-known that most people attending a seminar understand at most the first ten minutes and then not much after that. To combat this and, primarily, to make the seminar more user-friendly for PhD students at the new LSGNT, we have added a half-hour at the beginning of the seminar so that the speaker, or a relevant member of the Geometry groups at KCL or UCL, can give a more introductory-level discussion.
Whilst the use of this half-hour is completely up to the speaker, it has been typically been used to give something of an overview or context for the main talk. This initial experiment has proven to be rather successful, allowing the speaker to give more motivation and speak on a more general level before diving into the details of their own result.
With research becoming ever more specialised, and the number of research directions being pursued in London ever-increasing, it seems to me to have been beneficial not just to the PhD students, but also to the postdocs and faculty.
So it seems as if “pre-talking” is here to stay!
7 Responses to “Pre-talking”
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Jason D Lotay wrote on 18 January 2015:
I agree wholeheartedly with your approach to talks and people who follow your approach have no need for a pre-talk. The problem is that many speakers do not give seminars this way and so the pre-talk is a good way to encourage speakers to take a more elementary approach without making them feel they have to remove material from their main talk.
In some institutions they solve the problem by making the speaker give a two hour talk, where the first hour is “colloquium style” and the second hour is just for the experts. We haven’t gone that far.
Typically, most faculty skip the pre-talk and just come to the one-hour seminar, but students really seem to appreciate the pre-talk where the lecturer can go through an explicit elementary calculation/example in detail or give a grand overview of the subject.
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Dear Jason, I will try in my talk on next Tuesday (Jan 20) on capillary surfaces that it is accesible for (almost) everyone. On the other hand, I read in the past an idea from S. Krantz about how to give a talk. I hope to remember (for a conference, not a seminar) the rule of 1/3+1/3+1/3, in the sense that in the first part the talk is addressed for any mathematician, the second one, for any geometer (in our case), and the last one, only for ‘expertises’. In such a case, there would be at least 40 minutes that people may be interesting in the talk. In other words, I think that the solution is not the ‘pre-talk’ and that the problem is that, like many of us, we think the we should show how good we are in our field.