The following guidelines are to help you prepare your paper, workshop or poster. 

 Papers

What is a paper?

A paper presentation is a more in-depth way of sharing a particular event, project, piece of research or idea to delegates.  Relevant slides or photographs can be shown during your presentation to communicate a particular message. 

Paper presentations are 15 minutes long.  There will be 3 or 4 papers presented in each hour long session.  Presenters must stick to time to allow for a question and answer session at the end.  There will be five parallel presentation sessions and each will cover a particular theme of the congress.  Papers are grouped within sessions to be complementary.

Computers and data projectors will be available in each break out room, so delegates can prepare a power point presentation if they wish.  Pens and flip charts will also be available. If any other equipment is required, please contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .  Presenters will be required to submit any power point presentation and so on to the congress IT technicians and check their presentation before their session.

One break out room has facilities for Spanish/English simultaneous translation.  Breakout rooms have audience capacity of between 45 – 75 people.

Hints and tips for Power point presentations

Power point presentations can be a very useful tool for providing a visual back up to what the presenter is saying, with summary bullet points and images.  However, they are by no means compulsory to use, and there are many other ways to hold an audience’s interest.  If you would like to use power point, it might be useful to bear the following hints in mind.

Do:
• Use short snappy bullet points to summarise your key messages
• Illustrate with clear, relevant images or diagrams
• Make sure every thing is large enough and clear enough to read from the back of a room
• For clarity, make sure your text is in a contrasting colour to the background, for example, yellow on dark blue or black on yellow, pale blue on dark blue.
• Remember to use your skills as a communicator and educator to get your message across
Don’t:
• Include diagrams or charts that are very complex – they won’t be seen from the back of the room.
• Use large chunks of text
• Include the sound effects for next slides etc – this can be very distracting!

Please note:  As power points are just a tool to illustrate a talk, they are not sufficient for inclusion in the congress proceedings.  Please remember to produce a full paper for inclusion in the congress proceedings as well as your power point.

Workshops

Workshop sessions are 1¼ hours long.  There will be eight parallel workshops taking place within each workshop session.  This will mean there should be no more than 35 – 40 people in each workshop.  Delegates will be invited to sign up to workshops when they register at the congress, to prevent over crowding.

Computers and data projectors will be available in each break out room, so delegates can present a power point presentation if they wish.  Pens and flip charts will also be available. If any other equipment is required, please contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .  Presenters will be required to submit power point presentations to the congress IT technicians who will load them on to the computer before their sessions.

What is a workshop?

A workshop implies that a group of people will work together on a topic of common interest.  It also implies interaction between people.  This interaction normally takes place between the workshop facilitator/s and the workshop participants.  It is an opportunity for people to meet and discuss topics and issues of common interest as well as generate new ideas.

A workshop is different from a lecture, an illustrated talk or a demonstration, where the presenter normally does all the talking and tries to give the listeners information.  In a workshop information can be:
• Delivered by the presenter and then discussed by smaller groups
• Delivered after a general discussion by smaller groups
• Constructed by groups of people talking about the topic to each other
• Constructed by the participants
Everyone in a workshop has a role to play in developing different ideas and perspectives on a topic.  For a workshop to be interactive, participants should be involved as much as possible through active discussion, argumentation, brain storming, problem solving and developing new ideas.

Hints and tips for workshops

If you are including a presentation component to your workshop, have a look at the hints and tips above for power point presentations.
Some things to think about before you plan a workshop

• What is the purpose of the workshop?
Decide what the aims of the workshop are – build your planning around this, but remember that workshops often turn out differently from the way they were planned
• How can you ensure maximum interaction between participants?
Think about seating arrangements and group work
• What kinds of activities would engage the participants throughout the workshop?
Think about what methods you might use to achieve your aims.  Estimate how long each activity will take and try to make allowance for longer discussion and alternative ideas.  Make sure that each task is reasonable in terms of the type of activity, quantity of information, time allocation ad materials available.  Make a list of all the things you might need, e.g. handouts, questionnaires, resource materials, pens, papers etc – if there is anything additional you need the congress to provide, you must contact the organizers in advance.
• What will the follow up to the workshop be?
Make sure you keep note of what the outcomes are so that they can be included in your report on the workshop

Running the workshop

• Workshops can be difficult to run – don’t expect to be the perfect workshop presenter or your workshop to be perfect.  Things always change during workshops – be prepared to be flexible and to change your pre-set ideas (even if you have spent lots of time preparing them)
• Give clear instructions – it might be useful to have a power point slide with the instruction on which participants can refer back to whilst doing one particular activity.
• Invite comment and criticism from the group – allow discussion to happen, but keep it focused.  Don’t let participants go off on their own tangent, especially if it has no value for the rest of the group
• Keep it relevant by linking your discussion to participant’s own experiences, to make it personally meaningful to the whole group.
• During group discussion, spend some time with each group – this helps to encourage discussion and critical thinking and gives you a better perspective of people’s understanding and ideas
• Highlight parts of the discussion and examples being mentioned in the groups
• When applicable, put up participants work on the wall for further reference during the workshop.

Evaluating the workshop

It may be useful to ask participants to evaluate the workshop.  This helps you to reflect on what you did during the workshop, how you could change the workshop next time, how you can improve your practice and gives you further ideas for the future.  This evaluation can be done by talking to the participants or by constructing an evaluation form.

Planning the way forward

To help participants extend their learning to their own working environment, it is useful to provide feedback and follow up.  A good way of doing this is to collect the work done during the workshop and write a simple, easy to follow and useful report which you can send to the participants. 

 The above information is adapted from ‘Workshops with others – some ideas and practical hints to consider when planning and running an interactive workshop’ by Heila Lotz & Junior Primary Subject Advisory Group from the Northern Provinces, South Africa.  Published by Juta.

Posters

What is a poster?

Posters are a way of communicating outlines or overviews of a particular project, technique, research project or other achievement without having to give a full presentation. 

Hints and tips

When writing or designing a poster it may be worth thinking about some of the basic principals of interpretation.

Do
• Decide on a clear theme or message to communicate
• Think about your audience – educators and other staff from botanic gardens, universities etc all over the world.
• Use short, concise pieces of text of a large font.
• Test your text on your colleagues or family to see if the message is clear.
• Make it colorful and attractive,
• Remember to include your contact details somewhere on the poster so interested readers can contact you.
• Make yourself available during the poster session for interested delegates to find out more about your project

Don’t
• Feel you have to spend lots of money on it – home made posters are just as welcome as those that have been professionally designed and printed; clarity of the message is all that is important
• Include too much information, if you have two projects you would like to share, bring two posters!