Brent Jordan TED Talk Reflection

The final project of the multimedia writing and rhetoric course was a TED style talk. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design. I chose to give my presentation on student-athlete social media policies, which is the same topic that I investigated for my research paper. This topic is extremely current, relevant, and interesting. As a college student, it really bothers me that some of my peers are being censored because they are athletes. From talking to student-athletes it is abundantly clear that when it comes to off the field encounters, they just want to be normal students. I was able to find a significant amount of scholarly material that assisted me in developing a solution to this issue. My TED Talk consisted of me presenting the issue, evaluating current policies, and proposing a resolution. When developing my talk, I began by deciding what components of my research essay I wanted to include. My initial thoughts were conveyed in my Multimedia Essay Proposal. The majority of the ideas expressed in this blog post made it into the final presentation. However, I was unable to include every example and topic that I wanted to cover due to time constraints. It took careful consideration to decide which parts of my proposal I wanted to eliminate. I decided to skip the story about Manti Teo because it deviated too far from my central claim about the misuse of social media by student-athletes. The Teo story provides an example of a studentathlete following victim to an online predator, not inappropriately using social media. I also had to take out some of the information about the legal implications of social media bans. My logic was that I did not want to waste time giving a history lesson of previous court cases, I would rather spend my valuable time passionately persuading the audience with my own words and ideas. My original idea was to incorporate the story aspect through the examples of Sam Wheeler

or Marvin Austin. However, it felt forced when I attempted to present these examples as stories. I was extremely satisfied when I had the idea to start the talk with the boring story about deleting social media posts. I thought this use of story-telling was short but effective. I was extremely satisfied with my overall performance. My main concern going into the presentation was time. The first three practice runs I completed all exceeded eleven and a half minutes. After cutting down on some of the material and practicing repeatedly I was able to avoid going off track. Upon viewing my recorded performance I was happy to see that I did not come close to the time limit and that I successfully avoided going off topic. I believe I was able to articulate my points on each slide effectively, without sounding repetitive. I thoroughly enjoyed having the opportunity to present my findings from the research I conducted. Hopefully I was able to successfully engage with the audience and grab their attention.