Patrick Feng attended a recent Alberta Ingenuity Media Master Class event on campus aimed at discussing the communication of science and research with the general public and in The Media. He live blogged the session, and has some interesting thoughts on the various presentation styles used by the 5 presenters as they talked with Jay Ingram and the audience about their research.
I'm most interested in what seems like an emphasis on conversational (or at least natural, less formal) presentation styles. I think we need to figure out ways for more professors to take advantage of this style. Many stick to chalk-and-talk (or ppt-and-talk) because it's an easy, low effort presentation style that feels like they're accomplishing something (I have 150 bullet points in this ppt! it's great!).
The conversational style can take more preparation because you may not know exactly where you're going to wind up. On the other hand, it can take less preparation if you really know your stuff and recognize that the "audience" may know as much (or more) on a topic than you do.