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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.
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.
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
I could be wrong, but you seem to me to be operating from the premise that the only meaningful difference between communicating via chalkboard and communicating via PP is that PP is more featureful -- hence, referring to using a chalkboard as "regressing to using ONLY CHALK." I don't think that's true at all.
What TFA is suggesting is that communicating by chalkboard has fundamental differences from communicating by PP, in the same way (if not to the same severity) that communicating by in-person lecture is fundamentally different from communicating by a video on YouTube. It's conceivable that you could eliminate some of those differences by using PP in a way similar to how one uses the chalkboard -- for example, by entering content into slides live, in front of your audience -- but it's not obvious to me that there's a gain to doing that.
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.