8 ms·

I remember in college I was marked off for not putting everything I said in my presentation into the powerpoint verbatim. I knew the professor was being dumb,

I remember in college I was marked off for not putting everything I said in my presentation into the powerpoint verbatim. I knew the professor was being dumb, but I just took the grade and moved on. I wonder how many kids in the class actually took her advice.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
That is absolutely absurd, and I'm horrified that that's being taught.
- mhurron 11y ago
  It's so that you can send the slide deck out and people have the actual presentation when they see the slides. I hate when I go somewhere and they provided just the slides of a previous talk and the slides have no real information on them, there is no context or explanation as to what the bulleted points are talking about. Not to say that the talk verbatim in the presentation is a good idea either, but people seem to like giving out what amount to useless slides most of the time in place of a recording of the presentations.
  - haberdasher 11y ago
    If you were to use something like Presentious (https://presentio.us/ https://presentio.us/) to give your talk, you can capture all of the information presented without reading from your slides. And at the end of your talk, everything can be shared with your audience. For example: https://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs https://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs
    - fi788 11y ago
      Thanks for sharing Presentious. It sounds trivial, but producing lightweight presentations synced with audio is quite hard. I like how you can go ahead on audio or slides and then sync them back together.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    And very few people watch full-length 45 min. videos of presentations even when they're made. Views drop off after 3-5 mins. At the risk of being obnoxious, the slide deck should be whatever the presenter feels best supports their presentation in front of the audience. At a conference, that should be the overriding goal of the slides. They shouldn't be designed to provide background/context/explanation for someone who didn't see the presentation or didn't take notes. It's certainly possible to provide a link to a transcript/speaker notes/etc. and I sometimes do. But it's extra work and expense and, frankly, it's not at the top of my list of things to spend a day post-conference putting together.
    - jbergens 11y ago
      I think some slide notes could be created even if it takes some extra time. Some viewers might be there to learn and wants some notes/references while others are there for entertainment. If everyone is forced to take their own notes it might take attention away from the presentation itself.
      - fanf2 11y ago
        I find that notes are a natural result of preparing a talk. I write the notes to work out what I plan to say while designing the slides to support the script. The notes are the main way to communicate with people who weren't there or who need a reminder of what was said or to follow up references. Example: https://git.csx.cam.ac.uk/x/ucs/u/fanf2/talks/2014-03-nws42.git https://git.csx.cam.ac.uk/x/ucs/u/fanf2/talks/2014-03-nws42....
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Put that information in the speaker's notes, not in the visible slides.
  - jeffdavis 11y ago
    The purpose of a talk is to get someone interested enough to explore in detail in more appropriate formats. If they miss the talk, send them straight to the more detailed docs, and they can ask questions.
- caminante 11y ago
  He said he was marked off. If I had to guess, he likely overlooked a requirement. As sibling posts mention, there could've been a need for explicit slides (maybe in lieu of a write-up).
mattstocum 11y ago
Considering that the teaching method of a lot of faculty has become doing nothing more than reading the slides to the class, I can't say I find that surprising. Some of the best PowerPoint presentations I've ever seen have nothing more than a single word or compound word as a slide. Regardless of what anyone thinks of him, watching Steve Jobs deliver a keynote can give you a lot of good material to imitate. Your slide deck should be there to support your presentation, not be your presentation.
- markbernard 11y ago
  Agreed. Seth Godin does this as well.
- MrTonyD 11y ago
  Kind of off topic - but I happened to be sitting next to Steve when he created a couple of those conference talks. He literally started preparing months before the talk. He would work on his wording over and over and over. Since I happened to be there, he would often try out his "lines" on me and ask me what I thought (I had to correct him a lot. He really wasn't technical all.) He practiced over and over. And for the diagrams he had good help from people who understood that simple diagrams are always better (avoid cognitive overload). And don't buy the book "Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" - I looked though it and that author has no clue about how those presentations were really created.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
shalmanese 11y ago
I think one of the most corrosive lessons learnt from schooling is that accomplishment & success is based on following certain rigidly established guidelines created by some shadowy cabal of forces for essentially arbitrary reasons. You are judged by how well you conform to those standards and anything that does or does not happen as a result of your actions is out of your hands. It's an incredibly efficient way to scale your education system to the masses but it's producing broken people at the end of it who end up believing math is just about following the correct steps, history is about memorizing facts and english is about putting enough words on the page to hit a word count. Instead, we should be training students to take an outcome focused approach. Define what is the ultimate goal they want to accomplish, establish how to measure their impact towards the goal and suggest previously established strategies that have historically helped but then only evaluate them on whether they successfully achieved their outcome. Sports is actually a great example of this system working in practice. Your goal is extremely clear, there's clear feedback on your performance and tactics are widely available to learn. Nobody will penalize you in sports if you choose to kick with your left foot when "everyone knows" only right footed kickers succeed in life. More education should be structured around such a philosophy.
- ashurbanipal 11y ago
  You make a great point. Although I think that the line about producing broken people is overwrought. I manage a number of college grads who have achieved a lot under this system and I actually think, as a manager, it is quite helpful to have them "broken in" and follow what may seem like arbitrary rules - oftentimes seemingly arbitrary rules are actually quite rational and it may just take too long to explain to a new employee (which is what our education system is aimed at creating) exactly why a problem should be approached in a certain (again seemingly arbitrary) manner.
ddingus 11y ago
This being good advice depends on the audience and desired outcome of the presentation. Say you are working with a technical crowd, who may well be taking the presentation back with them for further study. In this case, having some depth in the slides might make a lot of sense, as would adding notes and links to information they will need or want. For that scenario, some careful use of bold, color, size will provide talking points useful for interactive discussion. No need to just read the slide. (I hate it when people just read the slides) Other times, it might make sense to have very brief bits of info. Often sales presentations go this route, but technical ones can too. People may take the presentation for reference later, but they came for the dialog and or what you are presenting more than they did attend to get all the info in text form. IMHO, my experience so far has been to know your audience long before you build anything. It's very helpful to get a review from a peer too. If it's important, it's also worth a half hour to talk through with somebody who can provide some insight. I've also found there is a very significant difference between selling ideas, things and people, and more detailed education type tasks. It's extremely efficient to pack presentations full of info for classroom settings. Depending on what one is teaching, and if it needs some interactive exercises or not, one document may make optimal sense. The people teaching for a living may well be demonstrating a strong bias here, well intended, that just might not be appropriate in a business setting.
josephmx 11y ago
At my school we were marked down if we put more than X words on a slide (The rule was if you can't read the entire slide on a projector across the room, you have too much text), everything else should be in the slide notes.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

That is absolutely absurd, and I'm horrified that that's being taught.

mhurron 11y ago
It's so that you can send the slide deck out and people have the actual presentation when they see the slides. I hate when I go somewhere and they provided just the slides of a previous talk and the slides have no real information on them, there is no context or explanation as to what the bulleted points are talking about. Not to say that the talk verbatim in the presentation is a good idea either, but people seem to like giving out what amount to useless slides most of the time in place of a recording of the presentations.
- haberdasher 11y ago
  If you were to use something like Presentious (https://presentio.us/ https://presentio.us/) to give your talk, you can capture all of the information presented without reading from your slides. And at the end of your talk, everything can be shared with your audience. For example: https://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs https://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs
  - fi788 11y ago
    Thanks for sharing Presentious. It sounds trivial, but producing lightweight presentations synced with audio is quite hard. I like how you can go ahead on audio or slides and then sync them back together.
- ghaff 11y ago
  And very few people watch full-length 45 min. videos of presentations even when they're made. Views drop off after 3-5 mins. At the risk of being obnoxious, the slide deck should be whatever the presenter feels best supports their presentation in front of the audience. At a conference, that should be the overriding goal of the slides. They shouldn't be designed to provide background/context/explanation for someone who didn't see the presentation or didn't take notes. It's certainly possible to provide a link to a transcript/speaker notes/etc. and I sometimes do. But it's extra work and expense and, frankly, it's not at the top of my list of things to spend a day post-conference putting together.
  - jbergens 11y ago
    I think some slide notes could be created even if it takes some extra time. Some viewers might be there to learn and wants some notes/references while others are there for entertainment. If everyone is forced to take their own notes it might take attention away from the presentation itself.
    - fanf2 11y ago
      I find that notes are a natural result of preparing a talk. I write the notes to work out what I plan to say while designing the slides to support the script. The notes are the main way to communicate with people who weren't there or who need a reminder of what was said or to follow up references. Example: https://git.csx.cam.ac.uk/x/ucs/u/fanf2/talks/2014-03-nws42.git https://git.csx.cam.ac.uk/x/ucs/u/fanf2/talks/2014-03-nws42....
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Put that information in the speaker's notes, not in the visible slides.
- jeffdavis 11y ago
  The purpose of a talk is to get someone interested enough to explore in detail in more appropriate formats. If they miss the talk, send them straight to the more detailed docs, and they can ask questions.
caminante 11y ago
He said he was marked off. If I had to guess, he likely overlooked a requirement. As sibling posts mention, there could've been a need for explicit slides (maybe in lieu of a write-up).

mattstocum 11y ago

Considering that the teaching method of a lot of faculty has become doing nothing more than reading the slides to the class, I can't say I find that surprising. Some of the best PowerPoint presentations I've ever seen have nothing more than a single word or compound word as a slide. Regardless of what anyone thinks of him, watching Steve Jobs deliver a keynote can give you a lot of good material to imitate. Your slide deck should be there to support your presentation, not be your presentation.

markbernard 11y ago
Agreed. Seth Godin does this as well.
MrTonyD 11y ago
Kind of off topic - but I happened to be sitting next to Steve when he created a couple of those conference talks. He literally started preparing months before the talk. He would work on his wording over and over and over. Since I happened to be there, he would often try out his "lines" on me and ask me what I thought (I had to correct him a lot. He really wasn't technical all.) He practiced over and over. And for the diagrams he had good help from people who understood that simple diagrams are always better (avoid cognitive overload). And don't buy the book "Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" - I looked though it and that author has no clue about how those presentations were really created.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

shalmanese 11y ago

I think one of the most corrosive lessons learnt from schooling is that accomplishment & success is based on following certain rigidly established guidelines created by some shadowy cabal of forces for essentially arbitrary reasons. You are judged by how well you conform to those standards and anything that does or does not happen as a result of your actions is out of your hands. It's an incredibly efficient way to scale your education system to the masses but it's producing broken people at the end of it who end up believing math is just about following the correct steps, history is about memorizing facts and english is about putting enough words on the page to hit a word count. Instead, we should be training students to take an outcome focused approach. Define what is the ultimate goal they want to accomplish, establish how to measure their impact towards the goal and suggest previously established strategies that have historically helped but then only evaluate them on whether they successfully achieved their outcome. Sports is actually a great example of this system working in practice. Your goal is extremely clear, there's clear feedback on your performance and tactics are widely available to learn. Nobody will penalize you in sports if you choose to kick with your left foot when "everyone knows" only right footed kickers succeed in life. More education should be structured around such a philosophy.

ashurbanipal 11y ago
You make a great point. Although I think that the line about producing broken people is overwrought. I manage a number of college grads who have achieved a lot under this system and I actually think, as a manager, it is quite helpful to have them "broken in" and follow what may seem like arbitrary rules - oftentimes seemingly arbitrary rules are actually quite rational and it may just take too long to explain to a new employee (which is what our education system is aimed at creating) exactly why a problem should be approached in a certain (again seemingly arbitrary) manner.

ddingus 11y ago

This being good advice depends on the audience and desired outcome of the presentation. Say you are working with a technical crowd, who may well be taking the presentation back with them for further study. In this case, having some depth in the slides might make a lot of sense, as would adding notes and links to information they will need or want. For that scenario, some careful use of bold, color, size will provide talking points useful for interactive discussion. No need to just read the slide. (I hate it when people just read the slides) Other times, it might make sense to have very brief bits of info. Often sales presentations go this route, but technical ones can too. People may take the presentation for reference later, but they came for the dialog and or what you are presenting more than they did attend to get all the info in text form. IMHO, my experience so far has been to know your audience long before you build anything. It's very helpful to get a review from a peer too. If it's important, it's also worth a half hour to talk through with somebody who can provide some insight. I've also found there is a very significant difference between selling ideas, things and people, and more detailed education type tasks. It's extremely efficient to pack presentations full of info for classroom settings. Depending on what one is teaching, and if it needs some interactive exercises or not, one document may make optimal sense. The people teaching for a living may well be demonstrating a strong bias here, well intended, that just might not be appropriate in a business setting.

josephmx 11y ago

At my school we were marked down if we put more than X words on a slide (The rule was if you can't read the entire slide on a projector across the room, you have too much text), everything else should be in the slide notes.