Gee Minor has it all worked out. On her wall is a very neat life plan, all done out in proper bullet points. It goes like this.
- I write a bestseller;
- Buy some farmland and build an eco-house;
- Think up another plan.
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I, Editor by Henry Gee
This is the Nature Network and therefore Terribly Extremely Very Serious foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. If you want fun and games, visit http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
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On The Slide
- Date:
- Monday, 30 Mar ch 2009 - 10:12 UTC
Meanwhile, over at Science Blogs, Dr Haile Allochthonous has a really great post called Death To The Outline Slide, fomenting Academic Jihad against those irritating slides at the beginning of presentations in which the lecturer tells you exactly what they are going to say, thus sucking any feeble vestige of life or, indeed, excitement there might have been from their rip-snorting, scales-falling-from-eyes, lightning-from-clear-sky revelations about the release of calcium from intracellular stores.
The comment thread is even more revealing, for it shows that not only do some graduate supervisors train their hapless charges to
inflictcompose such belles-lettres, but some conference organizers actually require such things of presentations submitted to them.Faugh, Fie, Gadzooks, Bismillah and Galileo, says Dr Hysteresis Artichoke (though not quite in those precise words). However, I’d like to propose an even more radical plan. If we can do without outline slides …
we can do without slides altogether.
I began to think of this some time ago, after someone asked me what I actually get up to at conferences. I thought about this for a while, but the only
honestanswer was ‘hang around in bars’.And why not? It’s in those interstices between formal presentations – at poster sessions, in the bar, at coffee breaks, over meals, that you learn what’s really going on – all the news and gossip about what scientists are up to. Sure, I observe slightly from the outside, but eavesdroppings reveal that it is in such situations that scientists forge collaborations, discuss and argue over progress and results and so on.
After attending conferences more often than girrafes change their socks, I have come to the conclusion that most platform presentations are a meal ticket – the delegate wouldn’t have gotten funds to go to the conference at all if they hadn’t agreed to present something.
And, let’s face it, most presentations are dull. Dull, dull, dull, Borington Athletic vs Tediumchester United dull (telegram claims required for 24 points). Apart from the dull outline slide that attracts the contumely of Dr Hillary Allosaurus, there are usually a lot of
clutteredcongestedincomprehensibleslides of experimental data that mean very little to anyone except the presenter and perhaps a very small group of other people, such slides invariably in print too tiny and faint to assimilate, containing concepts too convoluted to digest before the next similarly abstruse slide appears. Why, oh why, oh why, I ask myself, usually just before nodding off, am I wasting my time here? How, indeed, do I work this? And, I entreat you, Madam, will that bus ever get to the station?And why, oh why, oh why, does a lecturer, when presented with a time slot of duration t, always plan to talk for for that full duration t, but equally invariably talks for t + x, where x is the Over-Ambitious Superfluity of Slides Constant (incorporating the Stochastic Technical Cock-Up Factor), so that there is never any time for discussion? Do those supervisors who mandate the inclusion of outline slides ever require their students to plan their talks to last for duration t – d, where d is a proportion left open for discussion, which is what meetings are really supposed to be all about? No? Oooh, you do surprise me.
More pertinently, I ask why such presentations can’t be more effectively presented as posters, which would attract the select audience for which they are tailored, and the presenter can interact more directly with that audience?
If you start to think like that, you’ll see that most, if not all formal platform presentations are redundant wastes of time. A few platform presentations are really great – but that’s more to do with the skill of the presenter, and if they have something really important to say, or can present some grand, synoptic view of interest to a general audience. That’s what plenary lectures are for.
And then there are symposia at which the speakers are there by invitation, and the talks will be written up for later inclusion in a published volume. So why regurgitate material that’d do better in print anyway? The other day (OK, it was 1987, so sue me) I went to a symposium on tetrapod interrelationships, and talk after talk was punctuated by cladograms, cladograms and more f&^%ing cladograms. Except for one speaker who said that as his cladograms would appear in the book anyway, he’d decided to show us some pictures of animals – which is what the whole thing was all about, in any case. Needless to say his was the only talk I remembered.
As an Editor for Everyone’s Favourite Journal Beginning with N, I am often called upon to go out and demystify the editorial process before audiences of scientists. Long ago I would take slides (these were real slides, made of celluloid and plastic – Powerpoint™ was probably not yet a twinkle in the eye of
GarethDavidPearlyWilliam Henry Gates III)
William Henry ‘Pearly’ Gates III, yesterdayand, by means of clever flow-diagrams interspersed with cartoons, show people how manuscripts made their tortuous way from submission to acceptance. And yea, verily, I would bear witness to the glazing of eyes and the rumbling of stomachs, and the snores of those falling
offby the wayside.But no more!
After a while I got the picture that what my audiences wanted most was to ask questions – about the submission procedure, peer review and so on – so now I don’t plan anything. No slides, no visuals, no notes, no plan, just me and a roving mic, game-show-host style, though without the cheesy grin and spangly jacket. I turn up, say who I am, and no more than five or ten minutes in (so, OK, fifteen) I take questions from the floor. And everyone’s happy.
Should you continue this line of thought, I prithee take my arm as we promenade further down Iconoclasm Avenue, and ask whether conferences can and do happen without formal platform presentations? That a conference is effectively all hanging around in bars? Well, they can, and do happen, and they are called unconferences – my first one was SciFoo which I attended in 2007. It was the best conference I’ve ever attended, and as I said back then, someday, all conferences will be like this.
Last updated: Monday, 30 Mar 2009 - 10:12 UTC
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Comments
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I’ll buy Gee Minor’s bestseller.
I always used to use Powerpoints, but now increasingly do author talks without them. In some of my talks such as the one on infinity, the Powerpoint is essential, but there are no slides of words, or summaries of what I’m saying – all the slides are graphical illustrations of a concept or technique, and for that they are still very useful.
I’ve been avoiding Powerpoint as much as possible lately. It takes more effort to prepare for talks/lectures where you’re not going to use it (ironic isn’t it?) but I think it works much better without in some instances.
Great post though…we’ll see what Dr. Hippy Allotropic has to say about it.
My pet hate is the 20 minute talk where the first 15 minutes is taken up with background information – how the project came into being, who all the partners are and why they’re involved, who did what, etc. Then finally a brief section on preliminary results – full details to appear next year. What a waste of time.
I’m making slides right now (No, Eva, you’re reading blogs…) but I was originally planning on just showing the internet LIVE
Only I’m scared that the connectiond won’t work, and slides are pretty failsafe for showing things.
Also, your insight about conferences being nothing but hanging around in bars has been done. Swiss art curator Hans Ulroch Obrist once organized an art/science conference that was essentially nothing but a coffee break. That was pre-unconferences. Ironically, I will refer to this during my scheduled talk this week. I hope people won’t take it as a cue to get up and grab coffee.
Your daughter is adorable!
Historians resisted the PowerPoint nonsense at first, but sadly they have embraced it now. It makes sense to use slides to show a picture (of an artifact, for example, or a map, or even a more complicated quote) that is central to the talk, but often PP is used in the manner you describe. The worst transgression, in my opinion, is using animation — you know, the really silly, basic stuff you can do in PP.
I will also buy Gee Minor’s book, as long as she illustrates it. Has she come up with designs for the eco-house?
For me, the microarray slide has replaced the DNA sequence slide as Most Dreaded During a Scientific Presentation.
For lectures to 230+ medical students, or 100 dental students, I’m pretty much stuck with the Powerpoint —> Blackboard dynamic. Old-fashioned slides fade and crack, and the lettering can be exceedingly difficult to read from the back of a large lecture hall. Old-fashioned 2×2 slide presentations can’t be posted to Blackboard either, and that is a requirement for many courses here.
Edward Tufte addressed the issue of being stuck with PowerPoint in his one-day course, saying that it’s OK to use it as a “projector”, as long as the program doesn’t dictate the cognitive style of your presentation. Much of the time I think I use PowerPoint as a projector, to display anatomical diagrams or photomicrographs of embryos to relatively large audiences. Gotta watch the bullet points and chartjunk, though. But I would prefer to teach in small groups, using a wipeboard or chalkboard or large pad of paper; I only get to do this in anatomy and neuroscience labs, however.
Has she come up with designs for the eco-house?
Yes – it looks like a regular house but with a lot of solar panels, and a friendly cow grazing outside. I shall see if I can
stealborrow it for the purpose of scanning.You know, people who really make their living doing that thing called “public speaking”, never use PowerPoint. Ever. And their talks are often much better crafted, much more articulate, and much more compelling than those of the rest of us scientists.
Sad, really.
The author lives on an eco-farm in Norfolk, with 10 guinea pigs, 6 cats, 23 chooks, 7 bunnies of DOOM, 4 miniature horses, 2 golden retrievers, an extensive fossil collection, and one friendly cow ….
Adding insult to injury are the people (usually in training sessions) who print out EVERY SLIDE and distribute it as a fat wad of paper to the unfortunate participants.
I wonder how long it will take the internet generation to change this mindset? Last summer we went on a long trip and visited too many provincial museums. Almost all of them were arranged linearly, requiring you to walk through in one direction, beginning with the creation of the continent via plate tectonics. I began to LOATHE plate tectonics. Why do I need to know about plate tectonics to see the history of Manitoba? (Answer: because the main business of museums is parading schools tours through, and they’re the biggest customers because those unfortunate children are a captive audience) But the provincial museum in Saskatchewan was arranged as a series of rooms with multiple doors leading in different directions. Each room dealt with a discrete subject, and each door led you by a logical path to a related subject. You could choose your own route; pursue an idea and see where it led. And each time you visited the museum you could choose a different approach.
That’s a museum for the internet age. And now we need a conference for the internet age—which might be a whole lot of posters, business cards, flash drives (for swapping pdfs), and a giant bar.
Hooray! Someone else hates the outline slide!
I’ve never bought into the “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you’ve told them” approach. I always preferred to lead people through a story, hoping that, like with a good book or movie, the “ending” would surprise some people, and make others think “ah, yes, that’s where I thought she was going”. Sadly the “tell them x 3” approach seems to crop up in almost every set of “how to give a presentation” instructions and guidelines I’ve ever seen.
I’ve heard some pretty dire plenary talks over the years, throughout which I wondered Eru, who invited this pompous twerp? Once, a few of my colleagues were wondering exactly the same thing (without invoking Eru), out loud and drunkenly, in the back of the conference hall. My thoughts must be written on my face, because they instantly recognized me as a like-minded individual, albeit one who had better control of her Broca’s area and laryngeal muscles.
It would be great if there were more unconferences available; I really enjoy non-linear, interactive discussions that involve individuals with diverse backgrounds. For now, though, SciFoo looks very exclusive … dare I say elitist … to some of us peasants who are stuck outside the castle walls.
“For now, though, SciFoo looks very exclusive … dare I say elitist … to some of us peasants who are stuck outside the castle walls.”
That was one of the driving forces (“We’ll just throw our own”) behind SciBarCamp which I helped organize last year (and am supposedly doing again right now, if waiting around for e-mails is “organizing”. It is, isn’t it?)
It worked well because we’re in an area where unconferences for non-science (tech) fields are quite common. I don’t know what it’s like where you are. If that culture isn’t around, it’s probably hard to explain to people “Look, like that, but science.” But if you think even a few people might be interested, you can always organize something yourself. (It doesn’t work well with groups over 150, but there is no real minimum size.)
I wonder whether Twitter and liveblogging at conferences is the way to help shift from conference to unconference? But how many scientific conferences (outside the bioinformatics crowd) include Twitterfests?
Henry, you are so right. I think that poster sessions are very much underused in scientific meetings. And I would love to see poster sessions at science blogging conferences.
Buy some farmland and build an eco-house
Does it by chance look like this?
@ Kristi: The author lives on an eco-farm in Norfolk, with 10 guinea pigs, 6 cats, 23 chooks, 7 bunnies of DOOM, 4 miniature horses, 2 golden retrievers, an extensive fossil collection, and one friendly cow
How true. By popular demand, here is Gee Minor’s detailed technical study:
@ Martin: I have to say, it does look uncannily like the Duke University eco-house. Allowing for the artistic licence. And the cow.
@ Donna – welcome! And hooray for Saskatchewan over Manitoba, that’s what I say, and when the hell are you going to send something else into Futures, hmmmm?
If there is a general theme here, it is a transition in presentational styles from one in which the audience is pummelled into submission by the lecturer, and another in which the audience gets what they want from a conference. The latter is infinitely preferable in my view, but I guess it takes a certain amount of cojones on the part of the lecturer. Most lecturers are rather nervous and need structure to stop themselves feeling lost, when what we should be doing is what Sting advised – if you love somebody, set them free. (Tantric sex optional. While stocks last. Closed Wednesdays)
Tantric sex optional. While stocks last.
Tantric sex in stocks? Interesting. Do the stocks get worn out quickly?
I shouldn’t like to say, Frank. This is a Family Blog Platform.
It is humbling – and not a little terrifying – to see quite how similar my own life plan is to that of Gee Minor. It took me until I was 50 to come up with that one…
Trouble is – I’m running short of years at a truly apocalyptic rate…
Ho hum – better get back to the OTHER keyboard then…. For the next exciting episode of URE – before the market for print expires completely!
:-)
Sarbjit linked to an engaging speaker (and guitarist), Uri Alon. He made a meta-presentation (without Powerpoint) entitled How to Give a Good Talk. The text and video versions can be found here ; much concords with Henry’s perspective.