Reflection on the Pecha Kucha experience

When I reflect my very first Pecha Kucha presentation about Irish Gaelic, I have to admit that I am quite satisfied with it. There were certainly some mistakes that shouldn’t have occurred, but we could all turn a blind eye on them ;).

Monika Toma was my partner for the PK presentation. Working with her was actually very relaxing and easy as we have already held many presentations together so far. At the beginning of the preparations for our PK, each one of us collected information on her own and put it in a Google Doc. When the time had come to create an outline, we met and discussed about the information we had found up to that point. We both agreed on the scope of our presentation and so we could eliminate unnecessary facts. We didn’t want to bore our audience with dates. We decided to focus on the importance of the language and we wanted to answer the question why Gaelic actually did become one of the official working languages of the EU. Since the Pecha Kucha presentations were supposed to be entertaining, Monika and asked Fiona whether she could read out a short text in Irish for a short clip. She immediately agreed on that idea and so we filmed her with my camera. This was the fun part of the preparations. The most complicated part was to create a cohesive, well-written text and divide it into 20 seconds for each slide. We had some difficulties with that as some paragraphs were too short and others too long. But in the end we managed to resolve this problem. Picking out appropriate pictures for the Power Point was not complicated at all.

When the day of our presentation came, we met before in order to rehearse again. Apart from the fact that we had put the Scottisch map instead of the Irish on our PP, the presentation was quite good. At some points we were not always in parallel with our slides.

From my first Pecha Kucha, I have learnt that revising pictures properly is very important. I haven’t actually realised that we’ve used a Scottisch map which is quite embarrassing. In addition to that, we should have rehearsed more often. For my next Pecha Kucha I will surely try to not make the same mistakes again. But all in all, pretty much everybody was impressed by Fiona’s Irish.

I am convinced that Pecha Kucha is a very good way of giving a presentation. People are really thinking about the content of their presentations and do not bore the audience with complicated facts. This awareness enormously increases the quality of presentations and I myself was very enthusiastic and impressed by other Pecha Kuchas. They were all very creative and involved the participation of the audience. I really liked the Pecha Kucha about “Esperanto”. In such a short time, namely six minutes and 40 seconds, a completely new topic was presented to me very well. It left an effect on me which is what all presentations should do.