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.'"

Comments

We give chalk talks.

[delt0r]

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.

Slides vs White Powder

[Freshly Exhumed]

My wife and I have communicated exclusively with PowerPoint slides for the past 21 years. A chalk board would just make a mess.

Re:Slides vs White Powder

[wonkey_monkey]

Slide in, slide out, wipe down, fade to black.

Re:Hand out the PP slides after the talk.

[Freshly Exhumed]

But... but... explain to me how you can get a chalk board or white board to go "whooooooosh" when you go on to the next set of bullet points! I don't know about you but if it doesn't go "whooooooosh" I've lost everything salient and important about what you've presented. Oh ya one other thing... how do you get neat visual effects like folds and crinkly dissolves to happen with a chalk board or white board?

Powerpoint was the wrong tool for this all along

[idontgno]

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.

Re:Hand out the PP slides after the talk.

[Cryacin]

Yeah, physicists who have an interesting set of knowledge that they understand don't need powerpoint. It's designed for consultants, who justify their existence to the board.

"You want me to show you what I do in a day? Here is a powerpoint."
First Slide

"Here you can see a pretty graph"
Next slide

"Here you can see me making a joke"..... ha ha ha ha
Next slide

"Here's me collaborating with the team"
Next slide

"Here I'm drinking coffee."
Next Slide

"I came here to kick ass and drink coffee. And now I've finished my coffee"
Next Slide

"Here you can see me showing a powerpoint presentation of what I do in a day."

Re:Hand out the PP slides after the talk.

[the phantom]

I generally just yell "Whoooooooooosh!" really loudly as I erase. As for different visual effects, I sometimes use the small eraser, while other times I use the big eraser. I've even used a cloth rag every once in a while. If I'm feeling really snazzy, I'll use two erasers at once (one in each hand!)!

Any tool can be misused.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

There was a time in biology when the movable type made it really cheap to produce books with lots and lots of words. But pictures were very expensive. Botonists everywhere needed an unambiguous way to describe the plants to do the taxonomy and create the cladograms and genus-species classifications. So they came up with tons and tons of terms, like striated, ligule, periole, orbiculer, pinnatisect, ... ( You can see the whole glorious set here ).

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.