Audience Awareness

Lauren Kanzler

Justyn Cole

Enc 1102

February 4, 2010

The scholarly article we chose was called A Comparison of Face-To-Face and Distributed Presentations. The authors conducted a study in which they compare two learning environments. The first one is called Forum and it is a lecture that participants could access online. The top of their computer screen shows the speaker and the bottom half shows the PowerPoint in which the speaker bases their speech off of. This form of communication allows speakers to reach more audience members at a time and is more appealing to the audience members because they can do other things and access the lecture more easily then physically going there. Audience members can also ask typed questions to the speaker that they answer in their lecture.

The second learning environment is what the author calls local talks. These talks are when a lecturer talks to a conference room or classrooms. These talks had a smaller attendance than Forum because of the space provided. Forum averaged 141 people a lecture and local talks had 60.

The authors were surprised by the fact that Forum users reported to pay a lot more attention then those who attended local talks but audiences found material more interesting in the local setting. The speakers also rated their performance higher when they used Forum and they felt that Forum enhanced their performances by being able to use multimedia devices. The authors found however, that there was more audience interaction in local talks then in Forum presentations. Local talks averaged 19.5 spoken questions whereas Forum averaged 2.8 and audience members were more likely to follow up on questions in a local setting and attendees interacted with each other before and after class. They also were more likely to involve other people in their question at local talks. There was also an average of 16.3 instances of spontaneous laughter in local settings compared none in Forum.

As an end result of this study authors found that speakers enjoyed local talks more than Forum. They rated local talks a 4.25 out of 5 and Forum talks a 2.92. Audiences however, preferred Forum for its accessibility. 72% of audience members who attended local talks though said they would attend in person again.