The Information Collection Project is about you!

It's about YOU sharing one of your interests or passions with the world. It's about you sharing an idea worth spreading in the context of the topic you choose to address.

In a 3-5 minute speech to the class (this will be video taped) you will engage the audience with a visual of your choosing, relevant to the content and purpose of your speech. The visual components of your speech should support your over all message should deepen your audience's understanding. 

Learning to research is NOT the main purpose of this exercise. 

The purpose is to articulate a message that teaches your audience about your topic of choice AND inspires them to make a change, have an experience, or shift their thinking to improve their quality of life or to improve the world and all its humans. 

Give your audience a reason to remember what you shared. Through background information, audience engagement, and stories you share about how what you're sharing has impacted you. Moreover, you want to offer your audience a call to action in relation to your topic.

What you must know about inspiration..

Inspiration is conveyed through a combination of the following:

• Information (Ethos)
• Persuasion (Logos)
• Anecdotes (Pathos)

Click here to review the persuasive appeals of ethos, pathos, logos)

When giving information, it's like providing background information in an argumentative essay. In order for your reader to care about your ideas in your essay, your reader has to understand the current situation before they can understand or identify with your argument.

The same idea is present in the presentation of a speech.  If your topic is hiking, you have to provided information by way of a personal story, statistics, some photos, benefits, detailed information, etc, about hiking itself.

You are taking your listeners on a journey. When you give background information you are revealing the path they will take on their journey of discovery into your world. they have to understand the landscape of the information you're about to provide. 

Because you're building your credibility of the topic, your goal should be to provide information. Sometimes it's in the way of facts and data. Other times it's in the form of your expertise, other time this can be incorporated into a retelling of someone else's experiences with the topic. (When you share another's experience or information, you are narrowing credibility from a reliable source.)

Persuasion is never used on it's own. To be effective, especially in speech, it always partners with information and anecdotes. Your objective here is to provide benefits to the listener that will support the call to action you present. If your speech is declaring that hiking is an experience that opens your eyes to a whole new world, then identify just how it creates a shift in perception of the world around you. 

You can provide evidence, based on research - formal or informal - about how other people you've shared the experience with have changed. Or, maybe you found a great story online about how a teacher, with a passion for hiking loved it so much she build her life around taking young adults to the Rocky Mountains every summer and provide testimonials about when those young people experienced (I totally made that up, by the way).

You can always take about the negative impacts of NOT experiencing hiking (or whatever your topic is). How will the world be smaller to young adults if they are denied the experiences you've shared in your speech? How will they have less to offer to the world if they are sheltered in the concrete jungles of classrooms and metropolitan living? Will they miss out at creating a life of diversity? 

Just keep in mind, you don't want to become a "Debbie Downer" and provide your inspiration entirely from negative sources of information, although it can be effective. In this project, your intention is to uplift others with what you are sharing, so use negative support with care.

All great speakers share stories and not necessarily their own. You can borrow some else's story. Let's say there is a world class hiker you have been following for years. You've watched his successes, read his information, and you have read about his challenges. Let's say on one adventure, he was climbing Mount Rainier in Washington. When facing his travels on a large glacier, is slipped and fell. All alone, he was forced to survive in the brutal conditions for two days. He lives to tell about it and learns valuable life lessons that change him forever.

This may be just the anecdote you can share. Not because you have do intense research, but because you just know this information and you have been his fan for years. You may want to find an interview with the world famous hike, or show photos of his life before and after his life-threatening experience.

Do you need to tell a story about someone famous? Absolutely NOT! Your experiences are a powerful. You know why? Because YOU are the expert of your own experiences, and only YOU can convey the emotions of your experiences. No one can tell your story with the power of emotional impact like you can!