Pecha Kucha

I would like to start this post with a short description of "Pecha Kucha" for all my readers who do not know what this funny words means.

It describes a new presentation style. The basic concept is that within one "Pecha Kucha" (you say it like 'Petcha Ktcha") 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each giving one presentation the time of six minutes and 20 seconds. 

Preparing a Pecha Kucha on the topic of Swedish as a second official language in Finland made me realize how difficult it is to actually fit the time frame of 20 seconds. 20 seconds are nothing when you speak. Together with my project partner we started out creating a general outline for our presentation first. Once that was done and we had all the necessary information on the topic we thought writing down a transcript of what we were going to say would be a piece of cake. That was where we went wrong, completely wrong. I cannot recall how many times I actually rewrote my sections because what I wanted to say was either to short or to long for the 20 seconds. In general I think the reason to that problem lies in the fact that I usually am a very happy free speaker. I hardly ever really write a transcript for what I am going to say. The next problem I had was to exactly memorize my transcript as every tiny little mistake can completely destroy the time management and ruin the PK. Still, preparing the PK taught me how to fill exact frames and how to fulfil detailed requirements, a task that will be of great use to me in future.

After having done these really detailed preparations actually holding the presentation has truly been easy. We actually practised the PK a couple of times to make sure we new approximately how fast we could speak the individual sections. After that I think our time management was pretty great. The one fact that really bugged me about our presentation was the fact that due to the strict time schedule and my fear of forgetting my text I might not have made enough eye contact with my listeners. Speaking freely without holding cards with your text to stare on prevents you from making this basic mistake. Besides this one point in my opinion the PK we delivered was really good.