4 ms·

People seem to be more and more fixated on the "one thing per rapidly changing slide" style of presentation nowadays. I can certainly see the advantages of hav

by pak 16y ago

People seem to be more and more fixated on the "one thing per rapidly changing slide" style of presentation nowadays. I can certainly see the advantages of having only one thing in your audience's mind at a time as you blab--they're more focused, and the rapidly changing slides fits better with modern attention spans. But it definitely kills the utility of the slides on their own. For an even more difficult to follow slide deck see the git tricks presentation currently on the frontpage. 328 slides!

Groxx 16y ago
Probably in part due to things like SlideShare, where you can't read squat unless it's big, or you go into full-screen. In any case, I prefer it to wall-o-text styles, where the presenter has their notecards in the ppt and just reads off the screen.
koenigdavidmj 16y ago
Looks like it was Lawrence Lessig who first brought the method into our community (technically inclined content aficionados) with his lectures.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I think the style that Lessig popularized is a bit more extreme, along the lines of one slide per second or two, often with sentences split up across slides, and transitions synchronized with gestures or intonation. That makes the slides sort of a performance-art prop.
- riffraff 16y ago
  I would blame/credit audrey tang, pugs and the lambdacamels for popularizing the takahashi method[0] (notable difference from lessig's style is the lack of non-text content). My feeling about this is mostly anecdotical, but during the days of crazy pugs development a massive number of hackers from different communities was exposed to what was happening, tools designed for building such presentations bloomed, and, well, after that time I've seen a lot more of those :) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method
rhizome 16y ago
People may be fixated on the "one thing per rapidly changing slide" style of presentation nowadays, but I don't know anybody who is fixated on the "one thing per rapidly changing slide" style of reading.
- michaelbuckbee 16y ago
  I'm apparently the oddball that didn't mind the one thing per rapid slide for reading style. It reminds me quite a bit of things like the speed reading firefox plugin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuszcoVL3lA#t=2m10s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuszcoVL3lA#t=2m10s
dillydally 16y ago
If you're producing the slides for a live audience, this style is superior. People can read faster than you can talk, so if what you're saying is all packed onto the slides it creates a bad audience dynamic. If, OTOH, the slide you're producing are intended to be read, denser, more informational slides are appropriate. As with most things in life, what to do depends on who your audience is.
stevenbedrick 16y ago
One of my most important realizations when I first started preparing lectures was that there are two things that people use "slides" for. The first is as a visual aid, for use during the presentation itself. The second is as a set of notes containing the important information that the presentation was meant to convey. The things that make for useful notes are very different from the things that make for good visual aids, and when people try and do both at the same time... you get the craptacular PowerPoint disasters described ad nauseum by Tufte, etc. If I were giving a talk about various sneaky ways to recover from a borked chmod situation, I'd personally find the slides linked to in the parent to be just about right- each slide talks about one solution, and my audience would be able to focus on each solution as I was talking about it without a lot of extraneous visual noise. However, you're 100% correct that, for use as lecture notes, this format is suboptimal. As after-the-fact readers, it would be far more useful just to have a list of each solution, perhaps with a little bit of commentary for each one. As everybody knows, Tufte hates the "title with lots of bullet points" school of slide design with the burning fire of a thousand suns. However, IIRC, he dislikes the "one thing per rapidly-changing slide" approach as well, finding it indicative of a patronizing and controlling attitude towards one's audience. I'm not sure I agree with him 100% on this point- I've had pretty good luck using this style for lectures, although I've learned that students who are expecting more "traditional" slides (and are planning on using them as lecture notes) are disappointed when they see that my slides won't work quite as well as other people's for that purpose. Tufte's suggestion of providing a printed outline or handout containing more detailed or supplementary information is a good one, and I've started sometimes putting together separate outlines or "cheat sheets" with stuff that I think my audience might want/need to refer to later. One lovely piece of middle ground between the "minimalist" and "traditional" schools of slide design is Michael Alley's "Assertion-Evidence" slide structure ( http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html ). It's not always the right solution for every situation- in slide design, there's no one-size-fits-all "right" way to design a slide- but I've found that it works really well for presenting technical subjects, and the resulting slides make excellent ready-made lecture notes. On the other hand, preparing a presentation using his approach takes way longer, because you actually have to really think out exactly what it is you want to communicate and how you wish to do so- using either the "traditional" or "minimalist" approaches, it's possible to end up quickly filling a lot of space with empty and useless text, and that's absolutely not possible with Alley's approach. Of course, I personally see that as a feature of the Alley method rather than a bug, but there have definitely been times when I've been in a time crunch and found myself reverting to a less well-structured slide design just in the interests of getting the slides finished in time for a last-minute talk.

by pak 16y ago

Groxx 16y ago

Probably in part due to things like SlideShare, where you can't read squat unless it's big, or you go into full-screen. In any case, I prefer it to wall-o-text styles, where the presenter has their notecards in the ppt and just reads off the screen.

koenigdavidmj 16y ago

Looks like it was Lawrence Lessig who first brought the method into our community (technically inclined content aficionados) with his lectures.

_delirium 16y ago
I think the style that Lessig popularized is a bit more extreme, along the lines of one slide per second or two, often with sentences split up across slides, and transitions synchronized with gestures or intonation. That makes the slides sort of a performance-art prop.
riffraff 16y ago
I would blame/credit audrey tang, pugs and the lambdacamels for popularizing the takahashi method[0] (notable difference from lessig's style is the lack of non-text content). My feeling about this is mostly anecdotical, but during the days of crazy pugs development a massive number of hackers from different communities was exposed to what was happening, tools designed for building such presentations bloomed, and, well, after that time I've seen a lot more of those :) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method

rhizome 16y ago

People may be fixated on the "one thing per rapidly changing slide" style of presentation nowadays, but I don't know anybody who is fixated on the "one thing per rapidly changing slide" style of reading.

michaelbuckbee 16y ago
I'm apparently the oddball that didn't mind the one thing per rapid slide for reading style. It reminds me quite a bit of things like the speed reading firefox plugin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuszcoVL3lA#t=2m10s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuszcoVL3lA#t=2m10s

dillydally 16y ago

If you're producing the slides for a live audience, this style is superior. People can read faster than you can talk, so if what you're saying is all packed onto the slides it creates a bad audience dynamic. If, OTOH, the slide you're producing are intended to be read, denser, more informational slides are appropriate. As with most things in life, what to do depends on who your audience is.

stevenbedrick 16y ago

One of my most important realizations when I first started preparing lectures was that there are two things that people use "slides" for. The first is as a visual aid, for use during the presentation itself. The second is as a set of notes containing the important information that the presentation was meant to convey. The things that make for useful notes are very different from the things that make for good visual aids, and when people try and do both at the same time... you get the craptacular PowerPoint disasters described ad nauseum by Tufte, etc. If I were giving a talk about various sneaky ways to recover from a borked chmod situation, I'd personally find the slides linked to in the parent to be just about right- each slide talks about one solution, and my audience would be able to focus on each solution as I was talking about it without a lot of extraneous visual noise. However, you're 100% correct that, for use as lecture notes, this format is suboptimal. As after-the-fact readers, it would be far more useful just to have a list of each solution, perhaps with a little bit of commentary for each one. As everybody knows, Tufte hates the "title with lots of bullet points" school of slide design with the burning fire of a thousand suns. However, IIRC, he dislikes the "one thing per rapidly-changing slide" approach as well, finding it indicative of a patronizing and controlling attitude towards one's audience. I'm not sure I agree with him 100% on this point- I've had pretty good luck using this style for lectures, although I've learned that students who are expecting more "traditional" slides (and are planning on using them as lecture notes) are disappointed when they see that my slides won't work quite as well as other people's for that purpose. Tufte's suggestion of providing a printed outline or handout containing more detailed or supplementary information is a good one, and I've started sometimes putting together separate outlines or "cheat sheets" with stuff that I think my audience might want/need to refer to later. One lovely piece of middle ground between the "minimalist" and "traditional" schools of slide design is Michael Alley's "Assertion-Evidence" slide structure ( http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html ). It's not always the right solution for every situation- in slide design, there's no one-size-fits-all "right" way to design a slide- but I've found that it works really well for presenting technical subjects, and the resulting slides make excellent ready-made lecture notes. On the other hand, preparing a presentation using his approach takes way longer, because you actually have to really think out exactly what it is you want to communicate and how you wish to do so- using either the "traditional" or "minimalist" approaches, it's possible to end up quickly filling a lot of space with empty and useless text, and that's absolutely not possible with Alley's approach. Of course, I personally see that as a feature of the Alley method rather than a bug, but there have definitely been times when I've been in a time crunch and found myself reverting to a less well-structured slide design just in the interests of getting the slides finished in time for a last-minute talk.