Over at Cath Ennis’ blog we’ve been having a cheerful discussion about Powerpoint. Specifically, whether phrases arranged as a bullet-pointed list should be terminated with a full stop, comma, semicolon or firing squad (okay, I was joking about the semicolon).
However, a wider question is raised – should one be using Powerpoint at all? Do audiovisual aids act as a crutch, inhibiting the free flow of a presentation, rather than augmenting it?
One might argue that Powerpoint – or slides in general – are useful when presenting yer actual data. But are they? Most data-rich slides are impossible to read and are as soporific as Mr McGregor’s bolted lettuces to the flopsy bunnies.
Apart from that, slides serve as bookmarks for what the lecturer is saying: in which case the lecturer should carry their own notes, to avoid the temptation of looking at the screen rather than engaging with the audience.
That’s not to say I haven’t seen Powerpoint used to spectacularly good effect, but the occasions are memorable because they are rare.
Many years ago when the world was young, Nature held an editorial retreat in a very comfortable hotel in Bournemouth. More than a hundred editors from across the entire Nature Publishing Group attended, and all were encouraged to contribute a platform presentation about something or another.
Mine was about a pet editorial project (long since abandoned) and when confronted with the time slot I realized a number of things:
1. I only had five minutes;
2. that given such a short time, even a relatively minor technical SNAFU could completely derail my presentation;
3. the moderator was a lot fiercer than me despite being very much smaller, and would be unlikely to tolerate overruns of more than a few seconds;
4. in which case, using Powerpoint was out of the question;
5. especially as I’d never used Powerpoint before and was too lazy to learn;
6. er …;
7. that’s it.
Given these points (see 1-7) I decided to do my presentation the old-fashioned way. The night before I sat in my hotel room and wrote my presentation out in full, longhand, using ink, via a nib.
Then the script and I took a long, relaxing bath together, during which I could learn it, like lines for a play. The steam made the ink run a bit, but the effect on the paper might, to a disinterested observer the next day, look like I’d expended more passion and energy on it than I actually had.
The time came for the presentation, and I launched into it with gusto and a radio mike. It was all going rather well until I realized, quite suddenly, that what I needed most, at that instant, was – a histogram. Here was an occasion where Powerpoint – or even a flipchart – could have been useful. I was stunned that this hadn’t occurred to me before.
But there was me against more than a hundred rabidly slavering colleagues circling for the kill, so I had to improvise. Using the radio mike to explain what I was doing, I used my own body as the histogram. A tall bar was me standing up; a shorter one was me kneeling, a still shorter one was me sitting on the floor, and the long tail was me lying down, at full stretch.
Anyway, the audience loved it, and despite mine being only one of two presentations performed without Powerpoint, the delegates voted my presentation one of the most memorable events of the conference.
Nobody could remember what it was about, though – it was the Human Histogram that stuck in the mind.
The Human Histogram eh?
I agree that many presentations are not enhanced (and usually hindered) by powerpoint but people have lost the ability to speak to an audience without a technological crutch (I nearly wrote crotch there!). I’m a chemist and a very visual one and I need pictures of molecules when someone is talking about molecules or reactions. I just don’t follow the talk without pictures of the molecules (and similarly get frustrated with journal articles with no pictures of the molecules under study). Remember we’re supposed to cater to a variety of learning styles and not everyone can take in information just by listening ;-)
A friend of mine once demonstrated cellular migration by pretending he was a cell, and the director of our institute (who’d asked the question) was a chemoattractant. He gradually pulled himself along the wall towards the director, giving a very entertaining commentary about what the cell was thinking.
Pretty brave for a 1st year student!
I’ve never seen anyone mime a graph before though.
That reminded me…Dave Leigh of Edinburgh Uni Chemistry uses magic tricks in his talks to illustrate various points. Fantastic stuff.
Funny you should mention that. In a few weeks, I’ll be editing about ten Powerpoint presentations. Not only will they be presented – the attendees will get 2-up printouts to take home and show the kids.
As far as I am concerned powerpoint is mostly a convenience for the speaker, and I appreciate it very much if giving a talk. It is far easier to update talks, or to rearrange them if one notices it doesn’t work out as desired. Rewriting slides is just a great pain. Plus there’s cases where animations tell infinitely more than one could with pictures (think e.g. about structure formation in cosmology). If I’m in the audience, I don’t care much either way, as long as the speaker’s handwriting is clearly readable.
The other great thing about powerpoint slides is that you can edit your copy of a speaker’s slides if you don’t like them. You can’t do that with a human histogram.
Nice one Bob.
@Bob – I think I must be intrinsically uneditable. (A creationist would put this down to irreducible complexity…) But really, it must be so for fear of setting up strange quantum loops, for who can edit the editor?
But seriously, folksd, I have found powerpoint to be of inestimable use when hosting table quizzes in the staff canteen at Nature, where the acoustics are terrible. Putting the questions (and answers) on powerpoint slides meanz not having to repeat questions, and is also great when you know for a fact that at least one of the contestants is deaf.
I managed to freak some poor student out on this thread yesterday, just before his dissertation defense. Oops.
Poor freaked out studentWhat a hoot Cath. Gee, I’ve been attackedas if by magicby thecooldreaded strikeoutgizmobug.I remember it well, Henry.
You do? Perhaps yopu could tell me what it was like … I’ve blotted it from my memory.
Powerpoint Ninja Doug Zongker
Check out this Powerpoint presentation.
Clucking funny.Next up is this c/o Berci Mesko’s blog.