New Adventures in the Academic Switcheroo

Email 1:

I co-lead the [big project]. One of my responsibilities is putting together speakers for our monthly symposium. In looking through recent reports of talks, I saw your talk at the [international collaboration conference] this past August. I wonder if you'd consider reprising a considerably shortened version (20 minutes) of that talk for our January symposium event.

My response:

Thanks so much for the invitation.

My talk from this summer was a half-day hands-on session teaching [two pieces of software]. For your symposium I could do a brief intro to one of the tools. Which do you think would be more interesting for your audience?

Email 2:

That would be great, thanks so much. Maybe a better option would be to [talk about some hardware], the types of tools that can be used on it, how you see the [hardware] complementing other [hardware], what its unique capabilities are. ... I think it's more interesting to focus on what you have seen to be particularly compelling
uses for [the hardware].