Listening interpersonally is different than listening to a presentation. You can ask your questions immediately, rather than waiting for the end of the presentation and hoping for an opportunity. The personal and emotional investment in interpersonal listening is usually larger than in presentational listening. Interpersonal conversations are composed of give and take, whereas presentations are all give, until the end of the speech/presentation. Much of the time in a presentational setting, little response is required--or at least the response is shared by other members of the team or audience. In effect, you're not nearly as much on the spot in a presentational setting as in an interpersonal.
Osmo Wiio's humorous law on communication applies directly to listening: Listening usually fails, except by accident. Communication between computers usually works quite well, but human communication uses vaguely defined symbols. By their very essence, symbols are prone to misunderstanding. You use a word (or an idea) thinking it has a specific meaning, but the recipient of your message applies a different meaning. What's worse, without accurate listening skills, you usually have no way of knowing that.
The first step in in effective interpersonal communication is to understand the other person's symbols and ways of thinking. (The second, of course, is to acquaint him/her with ours.) A basic rule (I hate rules, but life won't work without them.) is that active listening demands that you attempt to understand another person's communication WITHOUT PASSING JUDGMENT ON WHAT IS BEING SAID.
A marketing manager and I created a simple acrostic for listening interpersonally. Since then, I've seen it elsewhere and in print. I guess that means we were really smart when we put it together. My client likes acrostics. . . so I'll give him the bulk of the credit. The Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible uses a number of acrostics but you can't recognize them without knowledge of Hebrew. English writers from the 16th century on used them, as did Edgar Allen Poe. You may remember that Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code was filled with mind-bending acrostic ciphers--letters used to hide messages.
Acrostics can be very useful memory devices when they are readily associated with the desired subject. Here's a great one for listening, easily associated with the act and more easily committed to memory: EARS.
--Explore the ideas of the other, asking questions of him/her, probing and searching to merely understand the terms and ideas.
--Accept the ideas as stated, and show this acceptance by restating, paraphrasing and summarizing.
--Respond with yes, no, judgments or differences.
--Stimulate with ideas of your own. This is the creative side of listening where you get your chance to take the conversation in whatever direction you wish.
Note that active listening involves hearing with our ears, but listening with our mind. To a great degree, listening involves questioning. Those are two reasons that listening is often very fatiguing.
P.S. Here are several more posts on listening: How to listen and not misunderstand, Listening successfully to non-verbal messages and How to listen with your eyes