It takes a lot of nerve to get up and talk to the public, and also takes nerve to open yourself up for critique.
The good things: it is well structured and covers the content well (at least from my perspective as not very interested in HPMoR), and you present the material with a lot of enthusiasm.
Areas for improvement: you have already identified the main things, eye contact and flow. I think this is all about your preparation approach, and it’s all related to using a detailed script. This interferes with your flow just about every time you have to look at the script and find your place. It also interferes with your eye contact, for the same reason. And also, quite a few places it feels like you are presenting in more of a written tone than an oral tone (although, not nearly as badly as most people who write out such specific scripts—you have mostly done a good job of presenting in a conversational tone).
So one question I suggest you face head-on: think about whether you could totally strip down your notes to a bare minimum, using them instead as landmarks to remind you of important structures and transitions in your talk, rather than as literal reminders of the precise words to be used to make a point. I commented before that such a change helped me to solve some troubling problems in my own public speaking. Although it’s very frightening at first not to have the safety net of a complete script.
Perhaps you could get the best of both worlds by making both a complete script and a minimalist set of landmarks, and only using the latter unless you get badly lost. Then you know that the worst case is that you have to pause for a moment, find your place in the complete script, and switch to that. In practice you will just use the minimalist landmarks, but having the script available may reduce the stress level.
(I haven’t tried this. On occasions when I’ve had to speak in public I have generally prepared a complete script and then felt free to ignore it.)
It takes a lot of nerve to get up and talk to the public, and also takes nerve to open yourself up for critique. The good things: it is well structured and covers the content well (at least from my perspective as not very interested in HPMoR), and you present the material with a lot of enthusiasm.
Areas for improvement: you have already identified the main things, eye contact and flow. I think this is all about your preparation approach, and it’s all related to using a detailed script. This interferes with your flow just about every time you have to look at the script and find your place. It also interferes with your eye contact, for the same reason. And also, quite a few places it feels like you are presenting in more of a written tone than an oral tone (although, not nearly as badly as most people who write out such specific scripts—you have mostly done a good job of presenting in a conversational tone).
So one question I suggest you face head-on: think about whether you could totally strip down your notes to a bare minimum, using them instead as landmarks to remind you of important structures and transitions in your talk, rather than as literal reminders of the precise words to be used to make a point. I commented before that such a change helped me to solve some troubling problems in my own public speaking. Although it’s very frightening at first not to have the safety net of a complete script.
Perhaps you could get the best of both worlds by making both a complete script and a minimalist set of landmarks, and only using the latter unless you get badly lost. Then you know that the worst case is that you have to pause for a moment, find your place in the complete script, and switch to that. In practice you will just use the minimalist landmarks, but having the script available may reduce the stress level.
(I haven’t tried this. On occasions when I’ve had to speak in public I have generally prepared a complete script and then felt free to ignore it.)