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Phew. Finally the reign of powerpoint begins to fade. If non-technical speakers spent less time faffing around before the session making awful looking powerpoi

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.
  - Crito 13y ago
    Maybe we just need overhead projectors back. There were a few things wrong with them (painful to look at while operating, and the bulbs tended to burn out if you moved them around while turned on) but fundamentally I don't think they were broken technology. Overhead projectors would be well complimented by computer projectors, but computer projectors make a poor replacement for them. Attempts to replicate the advantages of overhead projectors on computer projectors always fall flat, as far as I have seen. I think the demise of overhead projectors is an example of a regression caused by our tendency to have rose-tinted glasses whenever considering more technological alternatives to existing technology.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - rwmj 13y ago
      Interestingly decent second hand overhead projectors are going very cheaply on eBay.
    - Genmutant 13y ago
      In university we have cameras over some parts of the professors table which are directly projected on the screen. Works great without the the drawbacks of an overhead projector.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - Crito 13y ago
        I think that is probably the solution. I've seen somewhat similar systems that tried to be more technically advanced than that, but they always made things worse. Just a straight-up camera-feed to the projector would work great though. The advantage of these over overhead projectors would still be pretty small though (really only the being blinded and replacement bulbs issue), so you would need to ensure that the system is rock-solid reliable. If not, then you've just made it worse by making it more advanced.
- c0achmcguirk 13y ago
  This sounds like Prezi.
- dhimes 13y ago
  We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations. Isn't that what hyperlinks do? Perhaps I don't understand what you mean.
  - mattfenwick 13y ago
    Yes indeed, and in fact, I've given presentations from hyperlinked HTML documents before. What I liked about this approach was that you start out from your main content -- perhaps it's a summary or overview -- then you go off into a sub-topic, and then you come back to the overview so how the sub-topic is related to the whole is constantly being reminded to the viewers. So yes, that kind of thing is what I'm going for (but I'm no expert -- I would love to hear more ideas!)
- japhyr 13y ago
  Well, you can actually build non-linear presentations in powerpoint. I'm a high school teacher, and I had a rule for a while whenever students wanted to make powerpoint presentations. They had to build on-screen navigation into their presentation, just as if they were building a website. When they were giving their presentation, they had to use the on-screen navigation, instead of clicking forward and back. The navigation had to be semantic, it couldn't be just "next" and "previous". Presentations were interesting, because people were free to interrupt with questions such as, "Your data seemed to show xyz, can you explain how your conclusion of abc really follows from your data?" Then students could click right over to the data part of their presentation, without flipping through all the slides in between. Like most things, the problem is how a tool is used, not the tool itself.
  - josephschmoe 13y ago
    For something with any interface you want, a tool being used incorrectly is a flaw in the tool itself. Unless you're going way out of your way to use it incorrectly.
    - baak 13y ago
      That's a bit too broad. Someone holds a screwdriver incorrectly when screwing in a screw. The screw is slightly crooked because of the improper technique. Is the screwdriver fundamentally flawed because it allows the wielder to mess up? It's difficult for me to conceive something as portable, usable, cheap, and effective as the screwdriver, that does the same thing, and does not allow me to mess up. You have to make a sacrifice in some important category to get that. Programming languages can be pretty similar. Some are designed to make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but are far less popular (ADA is the example I'd use).
      - pseut 13y ago
        But if you'd seen hundreds of people use screwdrivers, and had only heard one anecdote about a correctly aligned screw in an online forum...
      - 13y ago
- masklinn 13y ago
  > We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations. http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/ http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/ (I really dislike these presentations)
  - mattfenwick 13y ago
    In my opinion -- and I know this is subjective -- that's a linear presentation. And so I would say no, that's not the kind of presentation I'm looking for. The content is arranged in a line, in some arbitrary order. The "vertical slides" add a bit of hierarchy, but again, I don't feel that they add any non-linearity to the presentation. Now, if say the 15th slide referred back to some content in the 8th, or if the 3rd-6th slides were all interrelated -- and this structure was reflected in the structure of the presentation -- then I would be enthusiastic. So tl,dr; I agree with you -- I dislike these presentations.
- 3pt14159 13y ago
  What I do is I write down all the key page numbers by hand then do a ^g to jump to them when questions come up.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- dublinben 13y ago
  It sounds like you're describing a mind map.
- glesica 13y ago
  Anything that occurs in the real world occurs linearly. Time is linear. If you are going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2, and B.1 before point B.2, but you will speak about point B.1 before point A.2, then just put them in that order: A.1, B.1, A.2, B.2 Problem solved.
  - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    >Anything that occurs in the real world occurs linearly. // Solution finding in a quantum computer? They're solutions are supposedly parallel and non-linearisable. Reading the solutions I guess forces linearity. There's also relativistic issues but you can solve those by saying there's an implicit "within any particular Inertial Frame of Reference". I think perhaps what you mean is anything that we experience we experience linearly; is that a better way of saying it?
  - mattfenwick 13y ago
    I'm not sure if we are on the same page here. What I am saying is that: - most (all?) topics are not 1-dimensional: they deal with multiple issues with many complicated interrelations and interactions. Let's call them multi-dimensional. - many people build 1-dimensional presentations using PowerPoint (and related tools). - treating a multi-dimensional topic as 1-dimensional makes for a poor, confusing presentation. To connect this with your point: the hard part of building a presentation is mapping an n-dimensional topic onto a 1-dimensional medium (time), while sacrificing the minimum amount of accuracy. Based on personal experience, many people don't spend much time on this part; they just throw a bunch of information onto slides in an arbitrary order. And so this smacks of circular reasoning to me: > If you are going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2, and B.1 before point B.2, but you will speak about point B.1 before point A.2, then just put them in that order. Problem solved. But how do you know you're going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2? Figuring that out is the hard part! ----- All this is just my subjective opinion, of course. :)
    - glesica 13y ago
      That's fine, as long as the final product ends up linear. What I can't stand is presentations with multiple "directions", like you can move "right", or "up" or "down". I find that to be just distracting and stressful because I'm never sure if I'm going in the "correct" direction or if I've missed something. To me, that style of presentation is a solution looking for a problem. We're going to view them in some order, just put them in that order and call it a day. If there is no order, then random order should be just fine. After all, what if you really needed more than two dimensions? You'd have to compress your ideas into a two-dimensional space anyway. Might as well make it one-dimensional and therefore less confusing.
- nekopa 13y ago
  If you have PowerPoint 2007, try to find an experimental plugin call pptplex. It allows you to create a presentation almost identical to the style you described, with an almost infinite zoom feature. It came out of the Microsoft research labs, where there mixed the technology behind Seadragon (now deep zoom - theres a great talk on TED with one of the creators of Seadragon)
keithpeter 13y ago
Interactive whiteboards? I'm a teacher, we have those in all our classrooms. You can prepare some sparse screens in advance, literally just starter points or sentences/images. Then annotate as audience throw up ideas. IW software allows export to pdf so email/upload during talk.
- SkyMarshal 13y ago
  My startup is looking into interactive whiteboards as a replacement/compliment to regular ones. We'd like the ability to save our whiteboard work to disk, for one. I'm tasked with figuring this out but have no idea what to look for for our use case - size, resolution, integrated WLAN, etc? What do you guys use?
  - ghaff 13y ago
    I haven't looked at these recently but I've never been too impressed when I have. These days, the recording part of a regular whiteboard is easy; just pull out your smartphone camera.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    Look at sibling comment and decide if you really need an interactive whiteboard or if simply using a normal dry wipe and taking photos and then tagging those in a photo gallery program systematically somewhere will be good enough storage/retrieval. My students still take photos of key screens even though I email out a pdf of the IW screens after the lesson. If you decide you really do need the IW, then try to find a local school/college that will let you play with theirs for an hour after classes. You will get a good idea of what the software can do, and you can find out about the drawbacks of various makes. One concrete advantage of an IW might be annotating actual screens. Most IW software automatically grabs screen of driving computer then allows you to write over the static image. All the IW software I have used (smartboard, active edition, the dolphin ones) allow saving of whiteboard stacks as PDFs.
bostonpete 13y ago
> Finally the reign of powerpoint begins to fade. I wouldn't be so sure. Scott McNealy famously "banned" PowerPoint at Sun in 1997 and people said the same thing then.
- deckiedan 13y ago
  sigh I know. But here's a guy being hopeful. :-)

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.
- Crito 13y ago
  Maybe we just need overhead projectors back. There were a few things wrong with them (painful to look at while operating, and the bulbs tended to burn out if you moved them around while turned on) but fundamentally I don't think they were broken technology. Overhead projectors would be well complimented by computer projectors, but computer projectors make a poor replacement for them. Attempts to replicate the advantages of overhead projectors on computer projectors always fall flat, as far as I have seen. I think the demise of overhead projectors is an example of a regression caused by our tendency to have rose-tinted glasses whenever considering more technological alternatives to existing technology.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - rwmj 13y ago
    Interestingly decent second hand overhead projectors are going very cheaply on eBay.
  - Genmutant 13y ago
    In university we have cameras over some parts of the professors table which are directly projected on the screen. Works great without the the drawbacks of an overhead projector.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - Crito 13y ago
      I think that is probably the solution. I've seen somewhat similar systems that tried to be more technically advanced than that, but they always made things worse. Just a straight-up camera-feed to the projector would work great though. The advantage of these over overhead projectors would still be pretty small though (really only the being blinded and replacement bulbs issue), so you would need to ensure that the system is rock-solid reliable. If not, then you've just made it worse by making it more advanced.
c0achmcguirk 13y ago
This sounds like Prezi.
dhimes 13y ago
We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations. Isn't that what hyperlinks do? Perhaps I don't understand what you mean.
- mattfenwick 13y ago
  Yes indeed, and in fact, I've given presentations from hyperlinked HTML documents before. What I liked about this approach was that you start out from your main content -- perhaps it's a summary or overview -- then you go off into a sub-topic, and then you come back to the overview so how the sub-topic is related to the whole is constantly being reminded to the viewers. So yes, that kind of thing is what I'm going for (but I'm no expert -- I would love to hear more ideas!)
japhyr 13y ago
Well, you can actually build non-linear presentations in powerpoint. I'm a high school teacher, and I had a rule for a while whenever students wanted to make powerpoint presentations. They had to build on-screen navigation into their presentation, just as if they were building a website. When they were giving their presentation, they had to use the on-screen navigation, instead of clicking forward and back. The navigation had to be semantic, it couldn't be just "next" and "previous". Presentations were interesting, because people were free to interrupt with questions such as, "Your data seemed to show xyz, can you explain how your conclusion of abc really follows from your data?" Then students could click right over to the data part of their presentation, without flipping through all the slides in between. Like most things, the problem is how a tool is used, not the tool itself.
- josephschmoe 13y ago
  For something with any interface you want, a tool being used incorrectly is a flaw in the tool itself. Unless you're going way out of your way to use it incorrectly.
  - baak 13y ago
    That's a bit too broad. Someone holds a screwdriver incorrectly when screwing in a screw. The screw is slightly crooked because of the improper technique. Is the screwdriver fundamentally flawed because it allows the wielder to mess up? It's difficult for me to conceive something as portable, usable, cheap, and effective as the screwdriver, that does the same thing, and does not allow me to mess up. You have to make a sacrifice in some important category to get that. Programming languages can be pretty similar. Some are designed to make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but are far less popular (ADA is the example I'd use).
    - pseut 13y ago
      But if you'd seen hundreds of people use screwdrivers, and had only heard one anecdote about a correctly aligned screw in an online forum...
    - 13y ago
masklinn 13y ago
> We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations. http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/ http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/ (I really dislike these presentations)
- mattfenwick 13y ago
  In my opinion -- and I know this is subjective -- that's a linear presentation. And so I would say no, that's not the kind of presentation I'm looking for. The content is arranged in a line, in some arbitrary order. The "vertical slides" add a bit of hierarchy, but again, I don't feel that they add any non-linearity to the presentation. Now, if say the 15th slide referred back to some content in the 8th, or if the 3rd-6th slides were all interrelated -- and this structure was reflected in the structure of the presentation -- then I would be enthusiastic. So tl,dr; I agree with you -- I dislike these presentations.
3pt14159 13y ago
What I do is I write down all the key page numbers by hand then do a ^g to jump to them when questions come up.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
dublinben 13y ago
It sounds like you're describing a mind map.
glesica 13y ago
Anything that occurs in the real world occurs linearly. Time is linear. If you are going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2, and B.1 before point B.2, but you will speak about point B.1 before point A.2, then just put them in that order: A.1, B.1, A.2, B.2 Problem solved.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  >Anything that occurs in the real world occurs linearly. // Solution finding in a quantum computer? They're solutions are supposedly parallel and non-linearisable. Reading the solutions I guess forces linearity. There's also relativistic issues but you can solve those by saying there's an implicit "within any particular Inertial Frame of Reference". I think perhaps what you mean is anything that we experience we experience linearly; is that a better way of saying it?
- mattfenwick 13y ago
  I'm not sure if we are on the same page here. What I am saying is that: - most (all?) topics are not 1-dimensional: they deal with multiple issues with many complicated interrelations and interactions. Let's call them multi-dimensional. - many people build 1-dimensional presentations using PowerPoint (and related tools). - treating a multi-dimensional topic as 1-dimensional makes for a poor, confusing presentation. To connect this with your point: the hard part of building a presentation is mapping an n-dimensional topic onto a 1-dimensional medium (time), while sacrificing the minimum amount of accuracy. Based on personal experience, many people don't spend much time on this part; they just throw a bunch of information onto slides in an arbitrary order. And so this smacks of circular reasoning to me: > If you are going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2, and B.1 before point B.2, but you will speak about point B.1 before point A.2, then just put them in that order. Problem solved. But how do you know you're going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2? Figuring that out is the hard part! ----- All this is just my subjective opinion, of course. :)
  - glesica 13y ago
    That's fine, as long as the final product ends up linear. What I can't stand is presentations with multiple "directions", like you can move "right", or "up" or "down". I find that to be just distracting and stressful because I'm never sure if I'm going in the "correct" direction or if I've missed something. To me, that style of presentation is a solution looking for a problem. We're going to view them in some order, just put them in that order and call it a day. If there is no order, then random order should be just fine. After all, what if you really needed more than two dimensions? You'd have to compress your ideas into a two-dimensional space anyway. Might as well make it one-dimensional and therefore less confusing.
nekopa 13y ago
If you have PowerPoint 2007, try to find an experimental plugin call pptplex. It allows you to create a presentation almost identical to the style you described, with an almost infinite zoom feature. It came out of the Microsoft research labs, where there mixed the technology behind Seadragon (now deep zoom - theres a great talk on TED with one of the creators of Seadragon)

keithpeter 13y ago

Interactive whiteboards? I'm a teacher, we have those in all our classrooms. You can prepare some sparse screens in advance, literally just starter points or sentences/images. Then annotate as audience throw up ideas. IW software allows export to pdf so email/upload during talk.

SkyMarshal 13y ago
My startup is looking into interactive whiteboards as a replacement/compliment to regular ones. We'd like the ability to save our whiteboard work to disk, for one. I'm tasked with figuring this out but have no idea what to look for for our use case - size, resolution, integrated WLAN, etc? What do you guys use?
- ghaff 13y ago
  I haven't looked at these recently but I've never been too impressed when I have. These days, the recording part of a regular whiteboard is easy; just pull out your smartphone camera.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  Look at sibling comment and decide if you really need an interactive whiteboard or if simply using a normal dry wipe and taking photos and then tagging those in a photo gallery program systematically somewhere will be good enough storage/retrieval. My students still take photos of key screens even though I email out a pdf of the IW screens after the lesson. If you decide you really do need the IW, then try to find a local school/college that will let you play with theirs for an hour after classes. You will get a good idea of what the software can do, and you can find out about the drawbacks of various makes. One concrete advantage of an IW might be annotating actual screens. Most IW software automatically grabs screen of driving computer then allows you to write over the static image. All the IW software I have used (smartboard, active edition, the dolphin ones) allow saving of whiteboard stacks as PDFs.

bostonpete 13y ago

> Finally the reign of powerpoint begins to fade. I wouldn't be so sure. Scott McNealy famously "banned" PowerPoint at Sun in 1997 and people said the same thing then.

deckiedan 13y ago
sigh I know. But here's a guy being hopeful. :-)