11 ms·

LHC Physics Center bans Powerpoint, switches to whiteboard-only forums

341 points by indus 13y ago

killerdhmo 13y ago
PowerPoint isn't the enemy. Poor use of PowerPoint is the problem. Bad presenters is the problem. People switching over to white boards won't make them better presenters, now they'll be communicating poorly in a messy unshareable medium. The solution isn't no PowerPoint. The solution is teach people how to communicate. How to present to both technical and nontechnical audience. How to write an executive summary / elevator pitch.
- kevincrane 13y ago
  Agreed. Now instead of people reading off of Powerpoint slides, they'll be talking into a whiteboard with their back to you, while you struggle to read their handwriting (and short of taking a picture of the whiteboard afterwards, you won't be able to review the notes).
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  PowerPoint encourages and rewards a particular style of communication (the "pitch") which is unsuitable for most uses. It also actively discourages many more effective forms of communication. As such most of the time using it does degrade the quality of communication and not using it is an easy route to improving the quality of communication. That doesn't mean it's impossible to use powerpoint well. Hell, it's possible to write world class code in Perl. It's possible to build skyscrapers in a swamp. That doesn't mean you should force yourself to do so. It's always smarter to stack the odds in your favor as much as possible.
  - ksk 13y ago
    People who are being presented to know when they are and aren't absorbing the material being presented. Its rather easy give your opinion on the cases where it doesn't work. It would be far more helpful if you had suggested specific alternatives..
GuiA 13y ago
On the topic, I love Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint": http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
mastermojo 13y ago
I've heard that writing equations on a whiteboard paces the talk and give the audience time to digest. With a slideshow most presenters will go at a pace comfortable for them, but that typically ends up being too fast for the audience.
ThePhysicist 13y ago
Now that's a great experiment! I think the use of Powerpoint is useful and mandated under certain circumstances (e.g. if you want to show experimental data), but when discussing a concept with your peers, working on a whiteboard is better for various reasons: 1. It forces you to think more about what you want to say and how you're going to write it down beforehand. 2. It sets a uniform pace for your presentation (writing stuff down is harder than advancing slides) 3. It lets your audience follow the train of thought that lead you to the results your presenting and allows your content to unfold before their eyes. 4. It invites participation and allows for easy modification and adaption of your content during your presentation (try that with Powerpoint). That said, structuring a good whiteboard talk/presentation is hard work too and I've seen many people (including professors) fail at it.
sentenza 13y ago
I'd say it makes sense for equation-heavy fields. The biophysics stuff I did during my Phd, however, worked very well with Powerpoint. I'd always have the images-and-diagrams-only presentation without text as my goal, which I usualy managed to almost-achieve.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Right, if the presenter has to spend forever scribbling on the whiteboard, that kind of kills the talk. Also, if you cannot read what they have written.
- blt 13y ago
  If you train yourself to become a decent draftsman, you can draw diagrams interactively on the whiteboard, explaining each part as you go. It's often more explanatory than throwing up the diagram all at once. Sometimes there is no substitute for a photographic image though. Animations can also be amazingly useful.
  - JoshTriplett 13y ago
    > you can draw diagrams interactively on the whiteboard, explaining each part as you go. It's often more explanatory than throwing up the diagram all at once. I find LaTeX and TikZ perfect for that. If you're comfortable with programmatic markup, it's easy to produce detailed incremental diagrams with minimal effort, without the usual Powerpoint approach of "copy, paste, edit second copy, repeat, hope you never need to systematically change the base diagram".
- elandybarr 13y ago
  Agreed. My preferred style was to iteratively build equations over a few slides, explaining the pieces as I went, and having a legend for coefficients/terms.
- tjl 13y ago
  The problem with equation-heavy fields is that slides don't allow for many equations on a single slide. This is a problem for derivations when you need to refer back to something.
deckiedan 13y ago
Phew. Finally the reign of powerpoint begins to fade. If non-technical speakers spent less time faffing around before the session making awful looking powerpoints, and more time learning how to speak engagingly, the world would be a much better place. This said as an Audio/Visual Operator who has spent hundreds of hours at a sound-desk watching technically inept speakers fail to impress - no matter how flashy the animations. The worse thing over the last few years is 'Prezi'. It's a powerpoint alternative which ostensibly makes it easier to make awesome looking graphics. The 2 problems with it are that it's a hell of a lot harder to actually present on a second screen, so you end up having to drag windows around, and that speakers are still under the impression that because you have swooshes and zooms and text folding inside other text, suddenly it's more likely for people to find the presentation content interesting. The trouble with BAD technology, is how do you fight it? The normal way is by competition - making better tech. But when the concept itself is wrong, but somehow culturely accepted...? Any ideas?
- mattfenwick 13y ago
  One of the biggest problems with PowerPoint presentations is their linearity (i.e. one-dimensional). Most topics, stories, etc. are not linear. We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations. A good start that I've tried was to make a 10-foot-by-10-foot drawing on GoogleDocs, and then arrange all my content within that one slide. Since it's a two-dimensional canvas, there's plenty of opportunities for putting related topics close to each other, even if you talk about them at separate times. It's also effective to put loops in your procession, so that you return to a topic that you covered earlier, reiterating its significance and reminding the audience of it. (Another advantage is that you can save it as a PDF. Then open it in a program, such as Chrome, which lets you zoom in as far as you want. You'll never have to worry about text being too small to read again!)
  - vonmoltke 13y ago
    It's funny, but overhead projectors were great for that. You could easily throw random foils on it as needed. You could draw on foils in real time with a marker. Hell, you could throw on a blank foil and draw on that if you wanted. We need a modern replacement for the overhead, and PowerPoint ain't it.
lqdc13 13y ago
I prefer Powerpoint over white/blackboard because: 1. People make mistakes on the whiteboard 2. You can't save it and review later 3. Even if you write everything down, it would still be less information than what someone could add in the Powerpoint 4. Powerpoint is much more legible 5. It is easier to go at your own pace during and after the presentation if someone is using a Powerpoint. If someone is using a white/blackboard they are going to erase the last part very quickly after they finished writing it down.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  Suggest you look at interactive whiteboards or similar. Best of both worlds potentially. See my comment up the page.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    The core issue is preparation and this is something spontaneous whiteboard lecture can't beat a well-preapred powerpoint presentation.
    - baq 13y ago
      completely disagree. my calculus and algebra professors never used powerpoint on any lecture and they were extremely well prepared. those were the best classes on the whole uni.
      - lqdc13 13y ago
        Several of my graduate math professors sometimes failed at solving Calculus problems on the board because they made a mistake somewhere and couldn't evaluate an integral. In Bio classes, almost everyone used Powerpoint. Those who did the blackboard approach had the worst lectures mostly because they wrote down very little and just talked about concepts.
        scotty79 13y ago
ColinWright 13y ago
Just as the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language[0], the truly inept presenter can produce bad talks with any tools. [0] http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html - see [1] for context. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pascal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pa... - see [2] for an alternative viewpoint. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel
- Crito 13y ago
  The problem is that some tools give people a false sense of confidence, making them beleive that if they have a 'good' slide deck, then they won't need to spend much effort preparing for everything else. Like people with a new 4-wheel drive car, driving in the snow for the first time...
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  A real programmer can build their slide deck in code. Not that this fixes the problem, but I was greatly inspired when I saw Matthew Flatt present with SlideShow [1] for the first time. [1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1166020 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1166020
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    A non-paywalled version of it (unless I missed the download link on that site): http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/jfp05-ff.pdf http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/jfp05-ff.pdf [PDF]
coherentpony 13y ago
This is dumb; my handwriting sucks. I'd hate to give a hand-written talk.
- fcmk 13y ago
  I don't think this is a good attitude. It similar to saying "Give presentations? This sucks. My presentation skills suck. I'd have to give a talk." Both presentation skills and handwriting are attributes you can improve and if they are part of your job, you should improve them. People seem to think handwriting as something not worth working on, as the last time it was on the table was when we were children. Or maybe they see it as fixed and unmalleable.
  - coherentpony 13y ago
    You try explaining that to 250 students that can't read what you write. "It'll be ok, my handwriting will improve over time," doesn't exactly fly too well. Also note that it's pretty hard to give numerical results to a computation on the blackboard. A plot generated by a computer program and embedded on a Beamer slide is optimal in this case. My handwriting is improving, and I do try to improve. The fact you didn't glean that from my, albeit curt, response is hardly cause for putting words into my mouth. I appreciate the feedback though.
  - jmccree 13y ago
    I don't think that's a fair comparison. Forcing hand writing instead of typing is an artificial limitation not related to the core skill set of presenting. I would consider that like telling a graphical artist, sorry no wacom, you can only use this 2 button mouse. Sure, they can likely improve their mousing skills over time, but what is the benefit? I'm dysgraphic and have typed every school report in since 3rd grade, so perhaps my view is biased on this matter. I remember being unable to learn cursive and my teachers telling my parents "Don't worry, by the time he's an adult everyone will type everything.". Their prediction has held true. Cursive is dead, removed from common core. Handwriting is up next. In my adult life, the only thing I've had to hand write other than my signature has been a few checks. Forcing hand writing is like forcing modern day car drivers to only take a horse and buggy to work. They could get better at it, but why?
Arjuna 13y ago
Here is a perfect example: John Carmack does a great job of rocking the white-board in this wonderful presentation. He starts out with a tablet, and uses that to track his discussion points, then hits a deep-dive on the white-board at approximately 00:18:45. I find this style absolutely engaging. Presentation software like PowerPoint has its place, but can make it all-too-easy to move through material too quickly. On the other hand, actually drawing and writing things out while discussing the topic slows things down a bit, allowing the audience to engage and understand the topic at a more learning-friendly pace. I personally find this "show me don't tell me" style of white-board presentation refreshing and conducive to my understanding of the topic. The Physics of Light and Rendering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw
- japhyr 13y ago
  I like the numberphile series on youtube. I showed one in class where he explains how some infinities are bigger than others. My non-math-inclined students were able to follow it by watching several times, because they could see the entire process. They re-created the process themselves, rather than just trying to digest an explanation of an already-completed proof/ demonstration. Infinity is bigger than you think http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elvOZm0d4H0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elvOZm0d4H0
  - mcphilip 13y ago
    I love Numberphile too and recently stumbled on Computerphile. The style is the same for both shows -- a passionate person explaining something reasonably complex. For instance, I like Computerphile's video on the evolution of character encoding and why UTF was developed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4
- timr 13y ago
  Agreed, a thousand times over. I lived through the transition from chalkboard + transparency classrooms (high school) to whiteboard classrooms (college) to powerpoint classrooms (grad school). I've also taught with all three. The real shock for me came later in grad school, when the undergrads (these were all upperclassmen) all basically expected that you'd provide them with the printouts of your slides, and therefore did nothing in class. They'd sit there, diddle on their laptops or phones, and then get cranky and exasperated when you'd tell them, "no, sorry...there are no slides. you have to take notes." Learning is simply better when you have to write things down. You're engaging your eyes, your ears and your brain...and you're well aware when you're goofing off. I wish colleges would ban powerpoint in the classroom, but since powerpoint is an epic crutch for the lecturer as well, I have my doubts that it will ever happen....
neurobro 13y ago
I would hope they also ban whiteboards. Very difficult to see, and the markers become translucent after about 1cm of chalk-equivalent use.
vishaldpatel 13y ago
Awesome awesome awesome! Physics classes at the LHC turned from nap-time for all to nap-time for some :D
baby 13y ago
I don't understand this. Most of my teachers use blackboards and it's really annoying to follow a presentation like that, you have to wait for the person to write, you have no slides later on to support your notes, and since you have no slides online you have to write everything they write, so you can't even listen properly to the talk. And some stuff are just clearer on slides... I don't really see a lot of benefits in whiteboard-only lectures. Combination of whiteboard and slides are best. I can still think of some great people who don't use slides but it's rare and a few people do it well (Gilbert Strang comes to my mind[1]). [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c
- snotrockets 13y ago
  You don't need slides to support your notes. There are two kind of classes: those that bring you up to speed; all the stuff there is found in textbooks or review papers. And those that present wholly new ideas (research seminars, conferences,) where you can just read the paper or the preprint for details. The only time I've seen something on the board that I really had to copy down to keep an copy of was exercises and their solutions.
  - baby 13y ago
    if your teacher has a textbook that he follows okay, but here in France most teachers don't and you have to copy everything they write. And even if they have a course online, they will waste so much time just writing it...
- Crito 13y ago
  I find that blackboard oriented lectures are much more conducive to audience/lecturer communication because during blackboard oriented lectures going off the rails is seamlessly natural, while that could not be further from the case with powerpoint oriented lectures. Overhead projector lectures are the best of both worlds. You can make pre-prepared foils but modify them on the fly, and create new ones on the fly as naturally as you can write on a blackboard.
wehadfun 13y ago
Banning powerpoint is a stupid reaction to some anti-powerpoint movement. Professors trapped in a college system that does not reward actual teaching is the problem. The powerpoints are just a symptom
- snotrockets 13y ago
  The academic system main goal isn't teaching, but research. You need to teach to train new researches, but teaching isn't an end goal.
  - wehadfun 13y ago
    People are taking out 6 figure loans to be taught not to further a universities research goals.
    - baq 13y ago
      1) where do you think that money goes? 2) if they're paying for stuff they aren't getting, whose problem is it?
    - gajomi 13y ago
      You mean 5 figure loans right? Five figures are quite common (I am paying one off myself) but I think 6 is really quite rare. In any case, with few exceptions tuition money does not get used to conduct any kind of research. Most of it will go towards some combination of paying for administration, facilities, and teaching fees for non-tenured lecturers (in the parlance of the US system). In fact, at most Tier I research institutions research grants are actually subsidizing educational expenses with various mechanisms built in to most awards requiring expenditures to this effect.
    - snotrockets 13y ago
      That's the problem with free markets: in reality, they are rarely (never?) rational. Let me offer a different modeling of academy as a market: The product isn't education, but the improvement of society, both in the near term, by fruits of research, and in the long term, by having more and better educated people around. So the students aren't the clients, but the product; which is paid for mostly in public funds (there is no such thing as privatize research. Almost all significant research has some public sponsored portion -- it's just too expensive to do without). Therefore, some countries even go and make higher education free, or near free. But, one can see you can increase your earnings, by also charging the students, as their graduation not only improve society as a a whole, but gives them personal gain too. So you do that, but it's more like marketing a bi-product, and not a product itself. Further evidence is that almost all PhDs are free to the student, even in the US (or at least, for promising students.) For non-libertarians, the above is a compelling reason for fully subsidizing education.
deleted 13y ago
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yeukhon 13y ago
I can see why scientists like whiteboard. In the old days, if you watch old clips from the 30s, 40s you would see scientists talking to their fellow peer with chalk and cardboard. They could start by saying "okay so we know this gas law from 1800s and then we saw this new behavior and we started investigating blah blah and then we came up with this new equation and here is the proof blah blah." That was the old days. Whiteboard worked fine. But was it fine? If you are delivering to five people, probably. What about 10, 20, 30, 100, 300? These are the things to consider when giving a presentation: 1. your target audience 2. time constraint 3. technology and tools available 4. scope of your presentation (is this a lecture, a short 15-minute progress report, or a workshop) “Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,” says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and a co-organizer of the forum. “We wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.” You see, if you are giving a two-hour workshop to a small group of scientists which everyone knows each other, the discussion can become interesting. But if you are giving a 30-minute workshop, a 30-minute talk to a larger group of people, whiteboard-free-style presentation breaks down. The main problem is that only a handful of people will fully comprehend what the speaker is up to regardless of which method. Some people are slower at picking up new ideas. It could be experience, language barrier (and sometimes it's the speaker's accent) or misunderstanding. People fear of asking dumb questions in front of a large group of experts so in the end it's just an interaction of the speaker with a handful of experts. The rest will just nod and follow on. Neither powerpoint nor whiteboard could solve the main problem entirely. But with powerpoint, one could traverse back and forth and audience does not have to suffer illegible handwriting (and in large group people could be sitting in the far back). This is something whiteboard-only discussion can't. So if they run a small group discussion, chalkboard is fine. But if they run a large group discussion, I argue start with slides and supplement with whiteboard. Slides should be there to deliver textual information, graphical information which are hard to explain or to follow on a whiteboard.
- 1ris 13y ago
  What I see as pretty good is the usage of touchscreens. Thinkpad tablets are very popular, but also huge (24 inch and bigger) monitors installed permanently. The presenter than can display a powerpoint presentation (usually it's actually Beamer and consists of mostly white pages) and write directly into it. There is some structure given (and displaying Images and video is much better), and yet the advantages of the cardboard remain. It's even possible to flip back and forth.
rachellaw 13y ago
reminds me of my old philosophy professor, he never used slides or anything. Just transparencies and "a magic lantern" hahaha -- he didn't even call'em projectors!
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
well word has long since ceased to be relevant (in the code literate world) Markdown, wiki mark up or similar has taken its place (and LaTeX always was close to ending it ) Now PowerPoint will join it as S5 and the like take over. just wondering if the spreadsheet will be the only survivor
devindotcom 13y ago
I don't mean to be a naysayer, but it's not like the entire LHC international organization banned Powerpoint. This is one forum at one arm of one project at the LHC. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great, but this is quite a small group we're talking about. I guess this is what the meetings look like: http://i.imgur.com/kNJOySY.jpg http://i.imgur.com/kNJOySY.jpg
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  It's not even at the LHC, it's at Fermilab, half a world away...
aaronetz 13y ago
Reminds me of the Anti-PowerPoint Party[1] (which was linked to on HN at some point). I would also like to say that I personally find whiteboard presentation much easier to follow. I taught a little bit too, but used slides, because it was easier. Maybe banning computer slides isn't such a bad idea... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-PowerPoint_Party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-PowerPoint_Party
mamcx 13y ago
Somethings are better without powerpoint-like presentation, but is possible to use it correctly. I have used the ideas behind http://www.presentationzen.com/ http://www.presentationzen.com/ with good results. Based on that, my mom setup a service to build that kind of presentations at http://www.emilypresenta.com/ http://www.emilypresenta.com/ (the site is in spanish for now), including finding, buying the photos/icons and the provide a basic layout for the talking part.
yomritoyj 13y ago
Having the speaker write out things on a board also has the advantage of giving the listeners time to think through what has gone before. In my experience this leads to more interesting discussion. I'm a teacher of economics and the only time I use slides is when I have to present a lot of data or literal text like the statements of theorems. Even in these situations I think distributing printed handouts works much better. But that involves logistics and expense.
twowo 13y ago
It is probably not centred around encouraging discussion but it reminds me of a beautiful piece from Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm
captainmuon 13y ago
As a particle physicist, I wholeheartedly welcome this. Our meetings, of which we tend to have 4-5 a week, are usually Powerpoint* orgies. Because of the intensly dense slides, its often hard to follow, and people don't listen to the reader but read the slides. Even worse, they think "I'll read the slides later" and work on their laptops in meetings. It's not rare to see 2/3 of a meeting work like sheep on their laptops (especially in larger meetings and talks), and only a small fraction is actually doing something talk related like viewing the slides, or doing actually urgent work. As a consequence, we have banned the use of laptops during talks in our group. What is completely normal everywhere else was a small sensation in our group, but I think everybody agreed that it is better now. We can't realistically ban Powerpoint, since as experimentalists we have to discuss lots of graphics and plots. What we did try once was to use our lab books instead. Every (PhD, Masters) student would write a summary of their week's progress in their lab books, including printed out plots, and we would project it with one of these old-fashioned book-projectors. It was nice because you could also go back and look at the details in the lab book, and it would give you an incentive to keep your books correctly. Unfortunately, it became unpractical as our group grew, and also because we have a lot of collaborators from other groups who are connected via video. ---- * Or Libreoffice, Keynote or Latex Beamer
- welterde 13y ago
  What we do in our group is to put all plots and images into a wiki and at the meetings each person in turn would then just tell the person behind the laptop what page to navigate to, etc.
Tomis02 13y ago
Interesting fact - the usage Powerpoint-like presentations was one of the communication weaknesses that led to the Columbia shuttle disaster. A very good read about that here - http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... More here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_shuttle_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_shuttle_disaster
mnl 13y ago
Good for them, but the truth is that every analysis group at CERN uses Beamer, Keynote or even Powerpoint for the almost everyday meetings via pdfs submitted to Indico (coupled with Vidyo). There's no reasonable alternative. Another completely different scenario are lectures or theoretical talks, there it never made much sense/it's a waste of time.

341 points by indus 13y ago

PowerPoint isn't the enemy. Poor use of PowerPoint is the problem. Bad presenters is the problem. People switching over to white boards won't make them better presenters, now they'll be communicating poorly in a messy unshareable medium. The solution isn't no PowerPoint. The solution is teach people how to communicate. How to present to both technical and nontechnical audience. How to write an executive summary / elevator pitch.

kevincrane 13y ago
Agreed. Now instead of people reading off of Powerpoint slides, they'll be talking into a whiteboard with their back to you, while you struggle to read their handwriting (and short of taking a picture of the whiteboard afterwards, you won't be able to review the notes).
InclinedPlane 13y ago
PowerPoint encourages and rewards a particular style of communication (the "pitch") which is unsuitable for most uses. It also actively discourages many more effective forms of communication. As such most of the time using it does degrade the quality of communication and not using it is an easy route to improving the quality of communication. That doesn't mean it's impossible to use powerpoint well. Hell, it's possible to write world class code in Perl. It's possible to build skyscrapers in a swamp. That doesn't mean you should force yourself to do so. It's always smarter to stack the odds in your favor as much as possible.
- ksk 13y ago
  People who are being presented to know when they are and aren't absorbing the material being presented. Its rather easy give your opinion on the cases where it doesn't work. It would be far more helpful if you had suggested specific alternatives..

GuiA 13y ago

On the topic, I love Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint": http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint

mastermojo 13y ago

I've heard that writing equations on a whiteboard paces the talk and give the audience time to digest. With a slideshow most presenters will go at a pace comfortable for them, but that typically ends up being too fast for the audience.

ThePhysicist 13y ago

Now that's a great experiment! I think the use of Powerpoint is useful and mandated under certain circumstances (e.g. if you want to show experimental data), but when discussing a concept with your peers, working on a whiteboard is better for various reasons: 1. It forces you to think more about what you want to say and how you're going to write it down beforehand. 2. It sets a uniform pace for your presentation (writing stuff down is harder than advancing slides) 3. It lets your audience follow the train of thought that lead you to the results your presenting and allows your content to unfold before their eyes. 4. It invites participation and allows for easy modification and adaption of your content during your presentation (try that with Powerpoint). That said, structuring a good whiteboard talk/presentation is hard work too and I've seen many people (including professors) fail at it.

sentenza 13y ago

I'd say it makes sense for equation-heavy fields. The biophysics stuff I did during my Phd, however, worked very well with Powerpoint. I'd always have the images-and-diagrams-only presentation without text as my goal, which I usualy managed to almost-achieve.

sliverstorm 13y ago
Right, if the presenter has to spend forever scribbling on the whiteboard, that kind of kills the talk. Also, if you cannot read what they have written.
blt 13y ago
If you train yourself to become a decent draftsman, you can draw diagrams interactively on the whiteboard, explaining each part as you go. It's often more explanatory than throwing up the diagram all at once. Sometimes there is no substitute for a photographic image though. Animations can also be amazingly useful.
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  > you can draw diagrams interactively on the whiteboard, explaining each part as you go. It's often more explanatory than throwing up the diagram all at once. I find LaTeX and TikZ perfect for that. If you're comfortable with programmatic markup, it's easy to produce detailed incremental diagrams with minimal effort, without the usual Powerpoint approach of "copy, paste, edit second copy, repeat, hope you never need to systematically change the base diagram".
elandybarr 13y ago
Agreed. My preferred style was to iteratively build equations over a few slides, explaining the pieces as I went, and having a legend for coefficients/terms.
tjl 13y ago
The problem with equation-heavy fields is that slides don't allow for many equations on a single slide. This is a problem for derivations when you need to refer back to something.

deckiedan 13y ago

Phew. Finally the reign of powerpoint begins to fade. If non-technical speakers spent less time faffing around before the session making awful looking powerpoints, and more time learning how to speak engagingly, the world would be a much better place. This said as an Audio/Visual Operator who has spent hundreds of hours at a sound-desk watching technically inept speakers fail to impress - no matter how flashy the animations. The worse thing over the last few years is 'Prezi'. It's a powerpoint alternative which ostensibly makes it easier to make awesome looking graphics. The 2 problems with it are that it's a hell of a lot harder to actually present on a second screen, so you end up having to drag windows around, and that speakers are still under the impression that because you have swooshes and zooms and text folding inside other text, suddenly it's more likely for people to find the presentation content interesting. The trouble with BAD technology, is how do you fight it? The normal way is by competition - making better tech. But when the concept itself is wrong, but somehow culturely accepted...? Any ideas?

mattfenwick 13y ago
One of the biggest problems with PowerPoint presentations is their linearity (i.e. one-dimensional). Most topics, stories, etc. are not linear. We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations. A good start that I've tried was to make a 10-foot-by-10-foot drawing on GoogleDocs, and then arrange all my content within that one slide. Since it's a two-dimensional canvas, there's plenty of opportunities for putting related topics close to each other, even if you talk about them at separate times. It's also effective to put loops in your procession, so that you return to a topic that you covered earlier, reiterating its significance and reminding the audience of it. (Another advantage is that you can save it as a PDF. Then open it in a program, such as Chrome, which lets you zoom in as far as you want. You'll never have to worry about text being too small to read again!)
- vonmoltke 13y ago
  It's funny, but overhead projectors were great for that. You could easily throw random foils on it as needed. You could draw on foils in real time with a marker. Hell, you could throw on a blank foil and draw on that if you wanted. We need a modern replacement for the overhead, and PowerPoint ain't it.

lqdc13 13y ago

I prefer Powerpoint over white/blackboard because: 1. People make mistakes on the whiteboard 2. You can't save it and review later 3. Even if you write everything down, it would still be less information than what someone could add in the Powerpoint 4. Powerpoint is much more legible 5. It is easier to go at your own pace during and after the presentation if someone is using a Powerpoint. If someone is using a white/blackboard they are going to erase the last part very quickly after they finished writing it down.

keithpeter 13y ago
Suggest you look at interactive whiteboards or similar. Best of both worlds potentially. See my comment up the page.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  The core issue is preparation and this is something spontaneous whiteboard lecture can't beat a well-preapred powerpoint presentation.
  - baq 13y ago
    completely disagree. my calculus and algebra professors never used powerpoint on any lecture and they were extremely well prepared. those were the best classes on the whole uni.
    - lqdc13 13y ago
      Several of my graduate math professors sometimes failed at solving Calculus problems on the board because they made a mistake somewhere and couldn't evaluate an integral. In Bio classes, almost everyone used Powerpoint. Those who did the blackboard approach had the worst lectures mostly because they wrote down very little and just talked about concepts.
      - scotty79 13y ago

ColinWright 13y ago

Just as the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language[0], the truly inept presenter can produce bad talks with any tools. [0] http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html - see [1] for context. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pascal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pa... - see [2] for an alternative viewpoint. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

Crito 13y ago
The problem is that some tools give people a false sense of confidence, making them beleive that if they have a 'good' slide deck, then they won't need to spend much effort preparing for everything else. Like people with a new 4-wheel drive car, driving in the snow for the first time...
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
A real programmer can build their slide deck in code. Not that this fixes the problem, but I was greatly inspired when I saw Matthew Flatt present with SlideShow [1] for the first time. [1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1166020 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1166020
- Jtsummers 13y ago
  A non-paywalled version of it (unless I missed the download link on that site): http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/jfp05-ff.pdf http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/jfp05-ff.pdf [PDF]

coherentpony 13y ago

This is dumb; my handwriting sucks. I'd hate to give a hand-written talk.

fcmk 13y ago
I don't think this is a good attitude. It similar to saying "Give presentations? This sucks. My presentation skills suck. I'd have to give a talk." Both presentation skills and handwriting are attributes you can improve and if they are part of your job, you should improve them. People seem to think handwriting as something not worth working on, as the last time it was on the table was when we were children. Or maybe they see it as fixed and unmalleable.
- coherentpony 13y ago
  You try explaining that to 250 students that can't read what you write. "It'll be ok, my handwriting will improve over time," doesn't exactly fly too well. Also note that it's pretty hard to give numerical results to a computation on the blackboard. A plot generated by a computer program and embedded on a Beamer slide is optimal in this case. My handwriting is improving, and I do try to improve. The fact you didn't glean that from my, albeit curt, response is hardly cause for putting words into my mouth. I appreciate the feedback though.
- jmccree 13y ago
  I don't think that's a fair comparison. Forcing hand writing instead of typing is an artificial limitation not related to the core skill set of presenting. I would consider that like telling a graphical artist, sorry no wacom, you can only use this 2 button mouse. Sure, they can likely improve their mousing skills over time, but what is the benefit? I'm dysgraphic and have typed every school report in since 3rd grade, so perhaps my view is biased on this matter. I remember being unable to learn cursive and my teachers telling my parents "Don't worry, by the time he's an adult everyone will type everything.". Their prediction has held true. Cursive is dead, removed from common core. Handwriting is up next. In my adult life, the only thing I've had to hand write other than my signature has been a few checks. Forcing hand writing is like forcing modern day car drivers to only take a horse and buggy to work. They could get better at it, but why?

Arjuna 13y ago

Here is a perfect example: John Carmack does a great job of rocking the white-board in this wonderful presentation. He starts out with a tablet, and uses that to track his discussion points, then hits a deep-dive on the white-board at approximately 00:18:45. I find this style absolutely engaging. Presentation software like PowerPoint has its place, but can make it all-too-easy to move through material too quickly. On the other hand, actually drawing and writing things out while discussing the topic slows things down a bit, allowing the audience to engage and understand the topic at a more learning-friendly pace. I personally find this "show me don't tell me" style of white-board presentation refreshing and conducive to my understanding of the topic. The Physics of Light and Rendering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw

japhyr 13y ago
I like the numberphile series on youtube. I showed one in class where he explains how some infinities are bigger than others. My non-math-inclined students were able to follow it by watching several times, because they could see the entire process. They re-created the process themselves, rather than just trying to digest an explanation of an already-completed proof/ demonstration. Infinity is bigger than you think http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elvOZm0d4H0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elvOZm0d4H0
- mcphilip 13y ago
  I love Numberphile too and recently stumbled on Computerphile. The style is the same for both shows -- a passionate person explaining something reasonably complex. For instance, I like Computerphile's video on the evolution of character encoding and why UTF was developed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4
timr 13y ago
Agreed, a thousand times over. I lived through the transition from chalkboard + transparency classrooms (high school) to whiteboard classrooms (college) to powerpoint classrooms (grad school). I've also taught with all three. The real shock for me came later in grad school, when the undergrads (these were all upperclassmen) all basically expected that you'd provide them with the printouts of your slides, and therefore did nothing in class. They'd sit there, diddle on their laptops or phones, and then get cranky and exasperated when you'd tell them, "no, sorry...there are no slides. you have to take notes." Learning is simply better when you have to write things down. You're engaging your eyes, your ears and your brain...and you're well aware when you're goofing off. I wish colleges would ban powerpoint in the classroom, but since powerpoint is an epic crutch for the lecturer as well, I have my doubts that it will ever happen....

neurobro 13y ago

I would hope they also ban whiteboards. Very difficult to see, and the markers become translucent after about 1cm of chalk-equivalent use.

vishaldpatel 13y ago

Awesome awesome awesome! Physics classes at the LHC turned from nap-time for all to nap-time for some :D

baby 13y ago

I don't understand this. Most of my teachers use blackboards and it's really annoying to follow a presentation like that, you have to wait for the person to write, you have no slides later on to support your notes, and since you have no slides online you have to write everything they write, so you can't even listen properly to the talk. And some stuff are just clearer on slides... I don't really see a lot of benefits in whiteboard-only lectures. Combination of whiteboard and slides are best. I can still think of some great people who don't use slides but it's rare and a few people do it well (Gilbert Strang comes to my mind[1]). [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c

snotrockets 13y ago
You don't need slides to support your notes. There are two kind of classes: those that bring you up to speed; all the stuff there is found in textbooks or review papers. And those that present wholly new ideas (research seminars, conferences,) where you can just read the paper or the preprint for details. The only time I've seen something on the board that I really had to copy down to keep an copy of was exercises and their solutions.
- baby 13y ago
  if your teacher has a textbook that he follows okay, but here in France most teachers don't and you have to copy everything they write. And even if they have a course online, they will waste so much time just writing it...
Crito 13y ago
I find that blackboard oriented lectures are much more conducive to audience/lecturer communication because during blackboard oriented lectures going off the rails is seamlessly natural, while that could not be further from the case with powerpoint oriented lectures. Overhead projector lectures are the best of both worlds. You can make pre-prepared foils but modify them on the fly, and create new ones on the fly as naturally as you can write on a blackboard.

wehadfun 13y ago

Banning powerpoint is a stupid reaction to some anti-powerpoint movement. Professors trapped in a college system that does not reward actual teaching is the problem. The powerpoints are just a symptom

snotrockets 13y ago
The academic system main goal isn't teaching, but research. You need to teach to train new researches, but teaching isn't an end goal.
- wehadfun 13y ago
  People are taking out 6 figure loans to be taught not to further a universities research goals.
  - baq 13y ago
    1) where do you think that money goes? 2) if they're paying for stuff they aren't getting, whose problem is it?
  - gajomi 13y ago
    You mean 5 figure loans right? Five figures are quite common (I am paying one off myself) but I think 6 is really quite rare. In any case, with few exceptions tuition money does not get used to conduct any kind of research. Most of it will go towards some combination of paying for administration, facilities, and teaching fees for non-tenured lecturers (in the parlance of the US system). In fact, at most Tier I research institutions research grants are actually subsidizing educational expenses with various mechanisms built in to most awards requiring expenditures to this effect.
  - snotrockets 13y ago
    That's the problem with free markets: in reality, they are rarely (never?) rational. Let me offer a different modeling of academy as a market: The product isn't education, but the improvement of society, both in the near term, by fruits of research, and in the long term, by having more and better educated people around. So the students aren't the clients, but the product; which is paid for mostly in public funds (there is no such thing as privatize research. Almost all significant research has some public sponsored portion -- it's just too expensive to do without). Therefore, some countries even go and make higher education free, or near free. But, one can see you can increase your earnings, by also charging the students, as their graduation not only improve society as a a whole, but gives them personal gain too. So you do that, but it's more like marketing a bi-product, and not a product itself. Further evidence is that almost all PhDs are free to the student, even in the US (or at least, for promising students.) For non-libertarians, the above is a compelling reason for fully subsidizing education.

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yeukhon 13y ago

I can see why scientists like whiteboard. In the old days, if you watch old clips from the 30s, 40s you would see scientists talking to their fellow peer with chalk and cardboard. They could start by saying "okay so we know this gas law from 1800s and then we saw this new behavior and we started investigating blah blah and then we came up with this new equation and here is the proof blah blah." That was the old days. Whiteboard worked fine. But was it fine? If you are delivering to five people, probably. What about 10, 20, 30, 100, 300? These are the things to consider when giving a presentation: 1. your target audience 2. time constraint 3. technology and tools available 4. scope of your presentation (is this a lecture, a short 15-minute progress report, or a workshop) “Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,” says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and a co-organizer of the forum. “We wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.” You see, if you are giving a two-hour workshop to a small group of scientists which everyone knows each other, the discussion can become interesting. But if you are giving a 30-minute workshop, a 30-minute talk to a larger group of people, whiteboard-free-style presentation breaks down. The main problem is that only a handful of people will fully comprehend what the speaker is up to regardless of which method. Some people are slower at picking up new ideas. It could be experience, language barrier (and sometimes it's the speaker's accent) or misunderstanding. People fear of asking dumb questions in front of a large group of experts so in the end it's just an interaction of the speaker with a handful of experts. The rest will just nod and follow on. Neither powerpoint nor whiteboard could solve the main problem entirely. But with powerpoint, one could traverse back and forth and audience does not have to suffer illegible handwriting (and in large group people could be sitting in the far back). This is something whiteboard-only discussion can't. So if they run a small group discussion, chalkboard is fine. But if they run a large group discussion, I argue start with slides and supplement with whiteboard. Slides should be there to deliver textual information, graphical information which are hard to explain or to follow on a whiteboard.

1ris 13y ago
What I see as pretty good is the usage of touchscreens. Thinkpad tablets are very popular, but also huge (24 inch and bigger) monitors installed permanently. The presenter than can display a powerpoint presentation (usually it's actually Beamer and consists of mostly white pages) and write directly into it. There is some structure given (and displaying Images and video is much better), and yet the advantages of the cardboard remain. It's even possible to flip back and forth.

rachellaw 13y ago

reminds me of my old philosophy professor, he never used slides or anything. Just transparencies and "a magic lantern" hahaha -- he didn't even call'em projectors!

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

well word has long since ceased to be relevant (in the code literate world) Markdown, wiki mark up or similar has taken its place (and LaTeX always was close to ending it ) Now PowerPoint will join it as S5 and the like take over. just wondering if the spreadsheet will be the only survivor

devindotcom 13y ago

I don't mean to be a naysayer, but it's not like the entire LHC international organization banned Powerpoint. This is one forum at one arm of one project at the LHC. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great, but this is quite a small group we're talking about. I guess this is what the meetings look like: http://i.imgur.com/kNJOySY.jpg http://i.imgur.com/kNJOySY.jpg

dkuntz2 13y ago
It's not even at the LHC, it's at Fermilab, half a world away...

aaronetz 13y ago

Reminds me of the Anti-PowerPoint Party[1] (which was linked to on HN at some point). I would also like to say that I personally find whiteboard presentation much easier to follow. I taught a little bit too, but used slides, because it was easier. Maybe banning computer slides isn't such a bad idea... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-PowerPoint_Party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-PowerPoint_Party

mamcx 13y ago

Somethings are better without powerpoint-like presentation, but is possible to use it correctly. I have used the ideas behind http://www.presentationzen.com/ http://www.presentationzen.com/ with good results. Based on that, my mom setup a service to build that kind of presentations at http://www.emilypresenta.com/ http://www.emilypresenta.com/ (the site is in spanish for now), including finding, buying the photos/icons and the provide a basic layout for the talking part.

yomritoyj 13y ago

Having the speaker write out things on a board also has the advantage of giving the listeners time to think through what has gone before. In my experience this leads to more interesting discussion. I'm a teacher of economics and the only time I use slides is when I have to present a lot of data or literal text like the statements of theorems. Even in these situations I think distributing printed handouts works much better. But that involves logistics and expense.

twowo 13y ago

It is probably not centred around encouraging discussion but it reminds me of a beautiful piece from Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

captainmuon 13y ago

As a particle physicist, I wholeheartedly welcome this. Our meetings, of which we tend to have 4-5 a week, are usually Powerpoint* orgies. Because of the intensly dense slides, its often hard to follow, and people don't listen to the reader but read the slides. Even worse, they think "I'll read the slides later" and work on their laptops in meetings. It's not rare to see 2/3 of a meeting work like sheep on their laptops (especially in larger meetings and talks), and only a small fraction is actually doing something talk related like viewing the slides, or doing actually urgent work. As a consequence, we have banned the use of laptops during talks in our group. What is completely normal everywhere else was a small sensation in our group, but I think everybody agreed that it is better now. We can't realistically ban Powerpoint, since as experimentalists we have to discuss lots of graphics and plots. What we did try once was to use our lab books instead. Every (PhD, Masters) student would write a summary of their week's progress in their lab books, including printed out plots, and we would project it with one of these old-fashioned book-projectors. It was nice because you could also go back and look at the details in the lab book, and it would give you an incentive to keep your books correctly. Unfortunately, it became unpractical as our group grew, and also because we have a lot of collaborators from other groups who are connected via video. ---- * Or Libreoffice, Keynote or Latex Beamer

welterde 13y ago
What we do in our group is to put all plots and images into a wiki and at the meetings each person in turn would then just tell the person behind the laptop what page to navigate to, etc.

Tomis02 13y ago

Interesting fact - the usage Powerpoint-like presentations was one of the communication weaknesses that led to the Columbia shuttle disaster. A very good read about that here - http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... More here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_shuttle_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_shuttle_disaster

mnl 13y ago

Good for them, but the truth is that every analysis group at CERN uses Beamer, Keynote or even Powerpoint for the almost everyday meetings via pdfs submitted to Indico (coupled with Vidyo). There's no reasonable alternative. Another completely different scenario are lectures or theoretical talks, there it never made much sense/it's a waste of time.