Category: Academia

Business Communication Impromptu Speech Topics

Today is the final class in my Business Communication MBA course at NYU Stern. While my students completed their final presentations during our last class on Monday, tonight they will have 2 minutes to prepare and deliver an impromptu presentation.

I thought it may be fun (and potentially useful for other business communication speech professors) to post the topics here. I gathered them from colleagues, online, and my own perspective:

  • Explain a business controversy you were part of and how you managed it.
  • Tell us who your hero is and why.
  • Describe how you responded to an unethical situation.
  • What one regret do you have from your college days?
  • Tell us about the most surprising thing you will take away from your experience at Stern.
  • Discuss your proudest moment.
  • What is the best book you ever read?
  • If you were tapped by the president to work with inner city schools, what would you do first?
  • Who has been your role model in your professional career?
  • Recall a time you were glad you listened to someone’s advice.
  • Tell us about a time when you discovered your leadership potential.
  • Tell us about the most valuable website you have visited.
  • Tell us about a time when you used your political savvy to push through a program or idea that you really believed in.
  • What was the best vacation you ever took?
  • What historical person would you most like to meet?
  • Tell us about a time when you had to sell an idea to someone who was not interested
  • Tell us about the most remarkable movie you have ever seen.
  • Discuss your idea of a perfect day.
  • If you can live anywhere, where would it be?
  • What is your most vivid childhood memory?
  • The expression / slogan / motto that best describes my view of life is…
  • What social cause means the most to you?
  • What management characteristic or trait would you most like to learn or improve upon?
  • Explain how a smart person might not be wise.
  • Tell us about the hardest thing you have ever done.
  • Tell us how to make a new friend.
  • Discuss a way you have helped a colleague.
  • If you sang performed with a professional musician, which one would it be with?
  • What is your favorite piece of art?
  • Do you prefer poetry, drama, or opera?
  • What would make the world a safer place?
  • What fear have you overcome?

Let’s see, choose a folder piece of paper, and you get one chance to toss it back in if your immediate assessment determines it does not feel right (I do not want this to cause any more stress than we all already have). 2 minutes to prepare. 2 minutes to speak. The rubric will include 5 elements:

Strategy:

  1. Gets audience attention
  2. Intent is clear from the beginning.
  3. Dynamic close leaves audience at high point

Delivery:

  1. Eye contact and Gestures
  2. Energy and engagement

I am really looking forward to this . . .

Autoethnography Listserv Discussion Heats Up

I have not been blogging much recently, as I have been slammed with the simultaneous wrapping-up of two classes I am teaching: Principles and Practices of Online Course Creation and Instructional Design and Research Process and Methodology. I do have a lot of material to share and reflectively work out on my blog, but for now I have been refining my lessons, correcting papers, and helping students with projects / research / practice.

One thing I have been reading with great interest in the last day or so has been the increasingly heated discussion on the Autoethnography Listserv. While autoethnography is a favorite qualitative research method of mine, I have never seen such an interesting discussion that revolves around some incidents that appeared to happen during the NCA conference in San Diego, held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt that has recently been embroiled in the Proposition 8 controversy in California.

The experience seems especially interesting, given the conference’s theme of “unCONVENTIONal.” This is well worth some attention in the wider community of scholar-practitioners.

Do Instructional Designers Need Research to Inform Practice?

Yesterday I posted some open questions in reaction to a discussion that Cammy Bean and John H. Curry had. They both suggested (here and here) that we pursue this further, so here goes.

While I ask questions because I am interested in my work as well as my research, I genuinely want to inform our field so we can better meet the needs of our clients, colleagues, and ultimately ourselves when we work within organizations. After all, the more we know and the better informed we are, the more we can leverage that knowledge and those experiences to effect positive change.

Of the questions regarding instructional design that I identified (to which there can undoubtedly be more added), this is the one that most grips me:

Do Instructional Designers Need Research to Inform Practice?

Let me share my perspective. I like the concept of evidence-based practice, and think it offers a lot to my work, thinking, and fundamental approach to life. I have written about the area of research and practice, as well as explored some of the questions around what practitioners even mean by the concept of research.

So, back to the question at hand. Can an instructional designer (ID) need formal, peer-reviewed research in order to do his or her job? Restated in a slightly different way, can this formal research support the work of the ID, even if on an infrequent basis?

Answering “yes” may mean that channels of communication between scholars and practitioners should be explored and opened. Answering “no” may show that academics in the field are working on research that has no practical value.

What do you think?

Instructional Designers, Scholar or Practice

I just read a fascinating discussion that Cammy Bean and John H. Curry had on the Effective Design blog. They raised a number of great issues about instructional design and how the academic approach to it does not always match the work in practice.

Ahh, how I love when the gap between research and practice becomes so apparent. As a self-described scholar-practitioner in the area of human resource development (an a professional instructional designer), I found their conversation engaging and respectful, while also raising countless issues about the field of ID / ISD:

  • should there be professional certification?
  • are the certifications already out there not doing their jobs well enough?
  • who should decide?
  • does Corporate America care?
  • what will gap(s) will this type of certification fill?
  • who will make money from the certification process?
  • how if at all will universities change or even become part of this process?
  • is there enough of a market for this?
  • is there enough research to actually have a body of knowledge, or is it only best practice?
  • is research needed outside of best practice at all?
  • how have related fields, such as training, OD, HRD, workplace learning and performance, and what have you addressed this and to what success?

These are just my first thoughts from a conversation that occurred in the recent past. I wonder what can be next to consider with this?

What I Hope to Improve as a Learning Professional

The Big Question - Instructional DesignI really like the ASTD Learning Circuits  Big Question this month, which is “What would you like to do better as a Learning Professional?”

This hearkens me back to a blog post I wrote yesterday, Whose Objectives Are They, Anyway? I want have better conversations, discussions, buy-in, and agreement of learning objectives between learner and instructional designer / trainer / instructor within higher education. 

The current system of instructional designer designing objectives based on a needs analysis that often does not acknowledge direct input from the learners does not respect the experiences and freedom of an adult population. While I follow the ADDIE process in everything I do, as a higher education instructor I create the objectives based on university expectations and often give them to the students without their input and buy-in. Common for higher education, but unaccaptable for adult education that seeks to acknowledge the active role of the learner in the learning process.

So, what do I hope to improve? Collaborative agreement on learning objectives within higher education.