Sociopsychological Tradition
A reflection and analysis on my presentation of Agenda Setting Theory and Cognitive Dissonance within this.
For our group presentation, we chose to define Sociopsychological Tradition.
We split our presentation into four sections, our first speaker introduced the concept of Sociopsychological Tradition, our second speaker explained the concept of interpersonal and intrapersonal phenomena, which try and determine the factors behind peoples thinking patterns, and our fourth speaker provided examples for us all as well as concluding.
As the third speaker, I attempted to explain two key theories within Sociopsychological Tradition: Agenda Setting Theory and Cognitive Dissonance.
Below I will upload the slides I used as the multimedia aspect of my presentation, and try and explain my thinking behind them as well as what I was talking about at the time. As I don't like public speaking from a written speech, and even find notes distracting to an extent, this won't be an exact replica of my presentation.
This first slide was used as a title for Agenda Setting Theory, which I covered first.
What is immediately apparent is that I abhor fancy powerpoint slides and use of effects. I think they look tacky and distract from the content of the slide. Perhaps it is an over-saturation of badly used microsoft 'word-art' that have been stretched outside their proper dimensions. Or just distracting colour patterns and fancy flying objects.
For whatever reason, if I am going to use a power point slide, it is as bare as possible.
I had this title slide up whilst I introduced the concept of Agenda Setting Theory, probably one of the shorter periods I had any slide up for (20 seconds?). I chose a key quote by McCombs and Reynolds, who are seen as the academics who first properly defined the concept, to display. I feel that it is a general quote that can introduce the topic broadly, whilst I elucidated on the concept specifically (as seen in the next slides)
This slide attempts to summarise my points as I am defining Agenda Setting theory. I chose this slide as part of my e-portfolio as I liked the combination of summary and quote and then a further 8 letter summary, I think by trying to note-format your points you have a better chance of your audience remembering them. An attempt at defining something 'simply' as well as in an extended format can prove effective.
Perhaps here is a good time to point out a downfall of my presentation.
I definitely did not use enough visual imagery or pictures.
My reasons for this are quite clear and are linked to a downfall of our presentation as a whole: whilst I was sick our other group members (and fair enough too!) allocated our roles within the group. It was chosen that one member should provide examples for all the theories we explained.
I don't think this was a very effective method, I think it would've been better to have the examples in the same time frame, and coming immediately after, the theories were explained. This seems to me to be a better method of explaining something. Further, it meant that it was hard to find any relevant visual imagery for what are purely academic and psychological theories if we are not allowed to talk about or use examples.
It also meant that when the fourth speaker showed examples they had to go back over what the theories were, perhaps unnecessarily.
I think this accounts for why my slides were so devoid of imagery, but perhaps I could've done better anyway!
This was the first slide introducing my second theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
As the first thing I needed to do when researching the term was get solid definitions for both Cognition and Dissonance as I was unsure of them, I felt this would be nice for the class as well.
I hope I fully explained that cognitive dissonance is not merely a mashing together of these two words but has its own unique and separate meaning: as hopefully shown in my third line which attempts to simply define the theory whilst i explain it.
These two slides were my discussion questions. The first one was shown to the audience, and then I wished to get responses and perhaps lead people in the correct direction if necessary. Once some kind of response had been given I would then show the second slide, which is a compilation of current news front pages from four top websites both nationally and globally. The second slide should hopefully show the topics that were covered by the class as current news issues.Hopefully this would prove the concept behind agenda setting theory, that the news directly impacts what we think of as the most current or pressing issues through repetition and by highlighting their importance.
Obviously there were two downfalls here: firstly the fact that our discussion was cut short by the length of our presentation, and secondly the possibility that the answers given by the class would not correlate with the answers shown on the second slide.
