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 c

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.