A post that's not about what to learn in school

A message on a mailing list I read pointed to Guy Kawasaki's blog post on what one ought to learn in school (Stephen Downes responds with his list). They are interesting and worth a read, but not what I intend to discuss here.

Poking around Kawasaki's blog took me to this post about the top ten presentations of all time. Note the use of presentation and not speech. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" was the only thing on the list which, in my mind, qualifies as a speech in a traditional sense. This got me thinking about college and university public speaking curricula.

Most higher education institutions require students to take a course in public speaking, where they give informative , persuasive, and impromptu speeches; learn about audience analysis and so forth. (Disclosure: In my own undergraduate experience , I embraced formal speechmaking, spending three years on the school forensic team and ending up not half bad at it, if I can toot my own horn a bit.) Here's the problem...

In these classes, students often spend a great deal of time studying formal speeches, even as formal oratory recedes from any kind of cultural importance. Ask an educated person what the last great public speech was, and they are likely as not to name King's "I Have a Dream" or Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech from five years earlier. One might go with something as recent as Mario Cuomo's "City on a Hill" speech from 1984 or Jesse Jackson's "Keep Hope Alive" from the same decade. One would be quite hard pressed to come up with anything more recent (say in the last 20 years) that captured popular awareness the way any of these did.

This raises the question, "Has anything replaced the formal speech in the culture?" The authors of the "Ten Greatest Presentations" post suggest that the speech has been replaced by the presentation or the talk. I think they might be right. When one thinks today about great presentation , one ismore likely to remember a "Stevenote" than anything from the political realm. It is telling that we now think of product announcements rather than sermons or political oratory as exemplars of excellent speechmaking.

What does this all mean about how we should teach oral communication? It is absolutely true that a liberally educated person needs to be able to speak to others and communicate effectively in so doing. However, given that one is less and less likely to have to give formal speeches, and more likely to be called on to give a "talk", is our emphasis on formal oratory in most required public speaking classes misplaced?

A related issue is the role of visual aids (let's just say it - Presentation slides). Most of the presentations on the top ten list use them. They receive little attention in most public speaking classes. Especially when you look at something like Lessig's Free Culture talk or Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 ( a personal favorite, I watched it several times just for the presentation, not caring particularly about digital identity at the time), you become aware of a very different and pervasive way of using visuals in a "talk".