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Physics Forum At Fermilab Bans Powerpoint
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Amanda Solliday reports at Symmetry that six months ago, organizers of a biweekly forum on Large Hadron Collider physics at Fermilab banned PowerPoint presentations in favor of old-fashioned, chalkboard-style talks. 'Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,' says Andrew Askew. 'We wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.' In one recent meeting, physics professor John Paul Chou of Rutgers University presented to a full room holding a single page of handwritten notes and a marker. The talk became more dialogue than monologue as members of the audience, freed from their usual need to follow a series of information-stuffed slides flying by at top speed, managed to interrupt with questions and comments. Elliot Hughes, a Rutgers University doctoral student and a participant in the forum, says the ban on slides has encouraged the physicists to connect with their audience. 'Frequently, in physics, presenters design slides for people who didn't even listen to the talk in the first place,' says Hughes. 'In my experience, the best talks could not possibly be fully understood without the speaker.'"
I always get much more out of a lecture if the instructor is actively diagramming on the blackboard. Maybe I'm old fashioned.
For precisely this reason. It also means you go at a speed where students can pick up the material. Slides you just go too fast. Most of the students like it. The ones that don't show up at class, not so much.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
My wife and I have communicated exclusively with PowerPoint slides for the past 21 years. A chalk board would just make a mess.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-feynman-tufte-princip/
Incompatibility between versions, useless features (plots) and absolutely broken formatting issues means most scientists are using TeX -> PDF these days. I spend a lot of my time talking them through converting video to animated GIF because codecs are flagrantly nonstandard worldwide.
this will be shocking news for you, but the high energy physics labs of the world collaborate
"The Military's Enemy Within: PowerPoint"
http://www.newser.com/story/87...
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
The bullet-point presentation was always about presenting evidence and alternatives for an executable decision. Classically, in a hierarchical organization where the receipients of the presentation are the functional leadership who are empowered to make and enforce operational decisions but expect their minions to gather "decision-grade information" and present it in a minimal-overhead, maximal-efficiency format.
It was never about collaboration or exploration. It gets used like that, but it's a terrible fit. It was never intended to encourage discussion. A well-crafted slide deck ends all conversation because all the facts are in. If the leader has to ask questions, or another participant questions your facts or your conclusion, your presentation was sub-optimal.
A bullet-point presentation is supposed to be the shortest path to an incontrovertible and non-debatable decision.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The LHC is at Cern. Maybe they should ban a bi-weekly forum on CERN's activities and focus on activities at Fermi lab?
Yes, it's terrible that physicists on one continent are discussing what physicists on another continent are doing.
What's next, scientists jointly publishing papers? Citing one another, willy-nilly? Reviewing their peers' work? Dogs and cats, living together?
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. I've been at very productive scientific meetings where someone puts up one or two slides of data and we spend the rest of the time in an open discussion around the whiteboard trying to figure out what it means (and which experiments should come next).
~Idarubicin
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tuf...
I've read the booklet and I found it persuasive.
Tufte (and iirc, Feynman) also cited reliance on Powerpoint on the Columbia disaster
I think it's important to understand what powerpoint is good for. It is good for helping an average presenter guide the delivery of low-bandwidth information into a low-attention span audience who are not subject matter experts.
In other words, it's good for 90% of the people, 90% of the time.
If you are trying to send people to space, or create controlled black holes on the European mainland, do not use it.
Another situation where PP can be used effectively is to present visual information - photos, charts, etc.
Ironically enough, I borrowed the Tufte powerpoint rant from the Microsoft Library here at work :)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Then with the advent of lithography to replace the woodcuts, the price of including diagrams in books started falling. So one would think the botonists everywhere shouted hallelujah and thanked the providence. No. There was serious opposition to these line drawings of simple plant forms to describe the species. They railed that the pictures were a distraction. Pictures are ambiguous(!), Images do not have the clarity of description afforded by the precisely defined technical terms. Pictures are for kids. Not for serious scientists. It took quite a bit of time for images to become common in botony books.
Now a days other than providing a rich source of words to stump the adults and torture small children preparing to be the spelling bee and to weed out the slackers in botony 101, there does not seem to be much use for these terms. (Well, I am not a botonist, and I am sure an army of them are going to rise up and roast me here.)
Power point was a novelty, and suddenly every one can produce slides and make presentations. Most people suck at content creation, and no amount of transition animation and font choices is going to make them better. Good communicators will excel in using power points. Bad ones will suck even with the chalkboard.
I agree most power point presentations are a waste of time. Most of them have very little content. Most of them suck big time. Where I disagree is, blaming the tool for the sins of the tool wielder.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"powerpoint" is a brand name for a computer program that can make visual computer images & text
**images & text**
that's all powerpoint is...
You are depriving students of a very effective communication channel b/c you don't know how to use it properly. I'm not saying TFA is "wrong" or that you personally are unprofessional...but **regressing to using ONLY CHALK is a problem of THE PRESENTER**
Chalk-only is much more simplistic. Science types are typically horrible public speakers. Using something as *visually complex* as PPT effectively in a speech or presentation requires mid-level presentation skills.
The first lesson I used to teach for PPT is "less is more" You can have 'slides' you hand out but don't present, also, your handout doesn't *just* have to have your PPT slides
Also, the "PPT" has become a way for people to procrastinate & do half-ass work. Especially in business sectors that are very perception-based, the presentation is what gets you the contract, not the RFP....not saying it's right or good, just describing how things often work.
Powerpoint is a computer program....**its just another communication channel** the fact that some people can't use it effectively means they need to *learn better communication and speaking skills*
Thank you Dave Raggett
ppt vs chalk-only is a false dichotomy
you can use **both**
this whole thing is about a lack of ability to use a complex communication channel effectively
Thank you Dave Raggett
A business flight over the Pacific developed problems and crashed into the ocean. Three survivors washed up on the beach of an island inhabited by cannibals - an American businessman, a French businessman and a Japanese businessman.
The cannibals had a long-standing tradition that gave each eaten one a last request before eating them.
They went to the French business man first. His last request was for a cigarette. The island was rather close to shipping lanes and many things washed up on the beach and were saved by the cannibals. In short order they had a carton of French cigarettes to grant his last request.
Then they went to the Japanese businessman. His request was a little tougher. When the plane went down he was on a trip to Japan to pitch a new product to investors. He had spent 6 months on a PowerPoint presentation and his last wish was to give that PowerPoint presentation. The island was rather close to shipping lanes and many things washed up on the beach and were saved by the cannibals. They managed to scrounge a generator and a projector and the Japanese businessman had managed to hang onto his laptop with the presentation after the crash. His last wish could be granted.
Then they went to the American businessman for his last request.
"Kill me first!" he said. "There ain't no way I wanna sit through another PowerPoint presentation!"
PPT is a tool, nothing more. People either use it effectively or they don't. If they don't, that's hardly the fault of the tool. There are plenty of people who use PPT well giving presentations, seminars, interactive talks every single day.
My suggestion: get better speakers.
I used to give presentations to our customers and prospects in our "Corporate Visit Center" and was always extremely disappointed with the dog-and-pony shows I experienced. The problem goes well beyond PowerPoint and gets into people who have no idea how to present an idea. I'd follow speakers who would have 100 slides for a 45 minute presentation, average 3-4 minutes per slide and then wonder why they were behind schedule.
I would show up with my PowerPoint presentation queued up and then I would challenge the audience to ask enough questions to be able to break free from it. After a while I got pretty good at never even getting past the title slide before breaking into a back-and-forth discussion and white-board diagramming. I consistently rated as the most popular speaker because I didn't walk in and present to the audience - I engaged and would talk about anything they wanted to talk about.
I remember a new guy came on board and he was sent to watch me after I was billed as the best presenter. He reported back that I never got past the first slide and the response from my manager was, "Exactly!"
PowerPoint is just one symptom of a larger problem: the inability to interact with an audience and discuss what they want to discuss. Even for those who needed PowerPoint in order to present I would coach them to not read the slides. The audience will read the words on the slides as you speak. The presenter should be telling a story that engages an audience - the presentation can be used as reminder points to the speaker or as either supplemental content for the audience to read or important/complex points you want them to take home for later study.
Having sat through far too many PowerPoint meetings, I've found that the problem isn't PowerPoint itself, but that most people have a compulsion to cram far too much information onto each slide. It basically gets turned into a teleprompt. So what ends up happening is that by the time the presenter done regurgitating what's on the screen everyone's already read through it all.
PowerPoint is best used to convey overarching themes and talking points. It frames what the presenter is going to say and helps emphasize critical points. This PowerPoint ban essentially produces the same net result, but what people really need is to learn how to use the application.
Doesn't everybody use Beamer nowadays?
Beamer FTW!
For our group meetings, we used to do chalkboard talks, and this year we ended them for all the same reasons. Without slides, the discussion tends to wander aimlessly, and the speaker does not get to talk about what she intended to talk about in the first place. It takes forever to sketch the simplest diagrams on a chalkboard, the resulting figure has little accuracy and the audience has to sit through a lot of pointless sketching where no information is being conveyed.
Most people still use LaTeX-Beamer rather than PowerPoint, but the latest versions of PPT actually have very good equation tools, so IMHO, there's little reason to favor one over the other. The days of academics trashing on PPT are long gone.
If you have any experimental data to show, you are going to need some sort of viewgraph projector or computer display. I don't think that many of ones colleagues would be content to trust that your hand-drawn data points agree perfectly with your hand-drawn "theory" curve!
That said, it is fantastic to see people going back to the chalkboard. What is really unfortunate is that most places have ripped out their chalkboards, replaced them with dry erase boards, and then stopped stocking them with fresh markers.
I always get much more out of a lecture if the instructor is actively diagramming on the blackboard.
That might be a valid argument for an undergraduate course, it might even work for a theory research presentation but it is not possible to accurately show experimental data without being able to show slides. Even in the days before video projectors we used acetate slides created by heat transfer from a photocopy or laser printout. You cannot just sketch a data plot on a blackboard and expect anyone to take it seriously.
They've even invented protocols for sharing information between themselves.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?