Giving Public Speeches Online: Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts on speaking online and in webinars.  I wrote it for a free online textbook for Dalton State College and other institutions as part of the OER movement. 

As we were looking toward this revision of Exploring Public Speaking, we realized that one area of public speaking that our readers might run into is “speaking online.”  Although traditional face-to-face public speaking has a 2500-year history and thousands of research articles to support it, speaking online is a relatively new procedure. This appendix will attempt to give some guidelines for this new mode of public speaking, gleaned mostly from business communication sources such as the Harvard Business Review.  The websites we used to compile this appendix are given at the end of it.

All online speaking is not created equal.  You might take an online class that requires you to send a video of yourself giving a speech for a grade.  You might be participating—or leading—a “webinar,” which is a meeting or presentation over the Internet using a tool such as Blackboard Collaborate, Citrix, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect, or one of many other webconferencing tools.   These have become very common in the educational and business world because they save a huge amount of money—employees, students, and learners can meet without having to travel to another location.

With this growth in popularity, we have a growth in problems and common behaviors, or misbehaviors, in webconferencing and thus online “public speaking.” Much of the advice on webconference public speaking comes as antidotes to the worst practices that have developed in them, which are:

1.     the audience’s multitasking (and thus not fully attending to the webinar)

2.     the audience’s being bored to death and going to sleep (which I confess to)

Both of these conditions come from the fact that the communication is mediated and that in many cases the speaker and audience don’t see each other.  Even when the participants use their web cameras (which doesn’t always happen), the screen is often covered with a slide and the speaker is invisible. Therefore, the speaker has to depend on something else to address the temptation to multitask or nod off.