After Presentation

All in all I think the presentation went really well, we all managed to gather relevant information for our presentation topic and it all gelled well together on the day of the presentation considering we didn't have a rehearsal, which others in the group have commented on because we were all doing different things on different days, but we managed to have two two hour meetings which was good for us to understand what everyone in the group was going to talk about and what order we were going to talk in. I really enjoyed the Jack The Ripper module because it was interesting how much Jack The Ripper is still talked about and how I have learnt that the ripper is still an ongoing theme in musicals, comics, books and movies. I liked working with the people in my presentation group, everyone was easy to get on with and none of them were a let down like some people can be when doing group work. We all committed ourselves to making a good presentation and I think we pulled it off!

Celebrity/Popular Supsects- James Maybrick

James Maybrick hit the headlines after his death, when a Michael Barrett claimed to have James Maybrick's diary, in which he confesses to be Jack The Ripper. The diary describes in graphic detail, the deadly forays into London and clearly identifies the killer as James Maybrick. If Jame Maybrick were Jack The Ripper, his death in 1889 would explain why the murders ended when they did. James Maybrick was never a suspect during his life, but his alleged diary focused an enormous amount of scrutiny on him after its discovery in 1992, many experts analyzed the diary checking for errors of fact or language not used in the 1880's and various experts attempted to determine the age of the ink, claiming it was modern. Significantly, a graphologist found that the handwriting was not that of James Maybrick and in 1994 Michael Barrett admitted in an interview that he had forged the diary, but the James Maybrick diary is still a subject of controversy, despite the evidence that it was a forgery.

http://www.casebook.org/suspects/james_maybrick/may.html

Celebrity/Popular Supsects- Sir William Gull

Sir William Gull was an English physician and doctor to the Royal Family, he was suspected as a Jack The Ripper suspect after the alleged marriage of Prince Albert Victor and Annie Crooks, after wiping Annie's memory and having her institutionalised for the rest of her life, Sir William Gull was asked to silence Mary Kelly and her friends, using his surgical skills to mutilate the bodies. A renowned spiritualist Robert James Lee allegedly had a vision which led to Sir William Gulls arrest and he was incarcerated in an asylum, his death announced and a mock funeral arranged to prevent the details of the royal conspiracy being revealed in a court case, but at the time of the East End murders Sir William Gull was 71 years old and had recently suffered two strokes that made him incapable of practicing medicine.

http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/dst-gull.html

Looking back

As everything is said in the previous posts I think I will emphasize the things that went fairly well. I dont want to contradict the fact that we should have practised before hand, but I think enough has been said about that.
First I want to bring forward the fact that the question: "why did people wanted a jack the ripper?" was the main purpose of our presentation. That we didn't only speak about certain suspects but wanted to emphasize the wide scope of suspects and the question why they were suspects. Foreigners were popular suspects because the Londoners didn;t know their culture, language and religion. What people don't know is often considered to be weird and frightening. The most ridiculous suspects were popular because some of them were different, weird or not normal according to what was accepted as normal in 1880. The famous suspects were famous and so the Londoners could not identify with them, the were different but in a different area.
Second,we all tried to not read our part from paper. That is always harrowing, but still it makes a presentation far more clear then just reading it from a paper. And accept for not rehearsing we had two meetings for 2 hours and our meetings during the classes. So our preparation was good. We all new from eachother what we were going to do and say. So I think well done for all of us. I really enjoyed working with you guys!
Have a great christmas!!

Review

Not to sound like a broken record but yes, rehersal was a bit of an issue with our group. It was a little difficult to organise out of class time due to the amount of people and the fact that we're all on different courses with different timetables. I think we were all fairly well reahersed on our own individual parts though, which hopefully showed in the fact that we weren't simply reading from a script.
Perhaps we should have gone with just two suspects each and say a minute and a half for both the into and the conclusion. This would have allowed us more time for things such as audience participation and the video of the ripper game.
All in all though, I think we got all of our research across fairly well?
Well done guys!

Evaluation

I have to agree with Sam. Rehearsing more would have solved the time management, as well as cutting down some information which wasn't relevant.
I lost my nerves though which caused me to stutter like a maniac, again losing time.
I have to admit however that we did a quite good presentation, we weren't the best but looking at groups who just read it from a paper, I think we still did great nonetheless.
We may also consider a different format next time - the trial was a grand idea, too bad we failed to apply it to our piece. Looking at the group who were before us, with the 'tonight show', I think they had a appealing angle to their presentation only because of their way of presenting. We used a more classic performance opposed to their creative solution. They might have just scored points for their format regardless of the information they were presenting.
Sam said it all I reckon, we should learn from our mistakes and use the feedback we might get for our future benefits.

Cheers,
pb

Post-Presentation Post!

Well done everyone on the presentation!

We did well enough, I only hope everyone notices of all the effort we put in.

Overall, I think we definitely showed the class a good insight into our work on the ripper case; however I do think it is a big problem that we ran over time. It's a shame that we ran over so much because I really didn't want issues of time to distract away from the actual importance of the workload. I think that upon reviewing this issue we can only gain a better understanding into future presentations and try to apply this hindsight into strengthening the structures of upcoming seminars.

Another way to avoid the time issue is by having more rehearsals. We may have timed ourselves beforehand but I know a lot us had added in bits and pieces. Perhaps next time, we can consult the others to notify and confirm when we edit, change and enhance things so that the rest of us may edit and change as well in order to fit the work into the required timeslot.

Also after looking back on the presentation, I noticed that there was perhaps a lot of info we could have cut down or taken out completely as it may have distracted from the importance of the other significant information we were trying to convey.

Sometimes when we edit things that we ourselves have written it can become a little difficult to pick up on the bits that need changing, so maybe we should try to help each other out by giving the group constructive criticism as we go along so that each of us may learn from past mistakes and change their work for the better. This tip can be useful to use with not only the content of our presentation but also with the way we present. I used this method of group analytical constructive criticism when rehearsing to present for another module and it really helped to skim over mistakes and fine tune the info so that we were under the 20 minute maximum. It helped a lot and I’m sorry for not suggesting we do the same sooner as I’m sure it would have helped us out too.

Also due to running over, there was no time to show the Ripper game clip or have the audience reacting to the ripper images which is a real shame because it would have tied the presentation together nicely, but apart from the issue of time and need for more editing, i think we did very well indeed. So thanks a lot.
Sam X