4 ms·
He may be senior, but he's not making sense. If somebody asks for your slides at your talk, there's a good chance they've seen the talk. So they have the cont
by beefman 16y ago
He may be senior, but he's not making sense. If somebody asks for your slides at your talk, there's a good chance they've seen the talk. So they have the context, they may just want a refresher later. Or maybe they saw something on a slide they couldn't make out before you advanced.
Besides, what do you care? What's the real reason you're refusing?
Here's the logical extension of the suggested alternative: don't bother to give a talk. Just send copies of your papers.
But that sounds silly to me. I think there's probably a reason people both give talks and write papers. So here's my suggestion: if your slides aren't worth giving out, don't show them when you speak.
- SeanDav 16y agoActually he makes perfect sense to me, it is his slides that don't make perfect sense out of context of his overall presentation. He cares because he cares about making sense, about having his name associated with something that does not make sense.
- alexqgb 16y agoAnd really, he has no idea what's going to happen to those slides, who else will see them, or what misconstrued message may come across in the absence of the talk itself.
- swombat 16y agoTough. Then maybe he shouldn't give talks. Who knows how they may be misinterpreted, even while he gives the talk! Communication is an uncertain art. You never know what people are going to do with what you tell them, even if they do get it clearly. If you don't want to take that risk, just don't give talks. If you want to play this game, though, maintaining an illusion that you have some kind of control over the ideas you're presenting once they've left your mind and turned into some kind of transmissible form (be it talking, slides, or interpretive dance) is downright false.
- FluidDjango 16y agoYes, it is always possible to be misinterpreted. But a presentation is an organic whole designed to minimize such misinterpretation - and usually designed to do so through careful coordination of slides and audio. I see no reason to feel required to make a partial presentation available when that subset might encourage misunderstanding. Consider: would Apple ever release a Jobs Keynote with slides-only. Not likely. The alternative they provide is to make the entire presentation (or select portions) available as complete AV presentations (QT or whatever).
- raganwald 16y agoI give my slides out, and they don't make any sense. Perhaps I think I'm so senior that I don't have to worry about someone looking at a single slide of mine and saying WTF?
- uxp 16y agoI recently requested the slides for a talk I unfortunately missed at a recent conference. There were plenty of areas that didn't make sense without hearing and seeing the actual talk, but overall I was able to get enough information out of it using common logic to make it useful. Who cares if some guy requests your slides. If he is unable to figure out the gist of the talk, or at least the gist of snippets of the talk, then that is his problem for missing the lecture and not taking personal notes. If he's able to get some information out of it, then great, we all win and the presenter doesn't have to do much more work except provide a link.
- nhangen 16y ago#1 - It's a business card. People might want to remember who gave a talk at some point in the future. #2 - In many cases, I've recorded or found a video of the presentation. Having the slides allows me to go back through once more.
- tlrobinson 16y agoHe's referring to conference organizers asking for the slides, not individuals.
- beefman 16y agoMost attendees will probably seek out the slides on the conference site, yes.