Agree with most everything everyone’s said. Many a news item has been lost to me because it’s presented as a video.
No fan of PowerPoint either, though I suppose it has its uses. But in a lecture, part of how I engage with the material is taking notes. I’m digesting and prioritizing the information as it’s coming out of the presenter’s mouth and into my ears; based on that, I write down the very most important stuff, generally.* If you’ve already done this for me, you’re feeding me intellectual baby food. You’ve done my work for me, and as a result, I neither retain nor understand the information as well as I might have. Also, you’ve bored me to death and I’ve spent a lot more time doodling on my notepad, daydreaming, or reading the SDMB.
The only thing worse? Handing out a printed copy of the slides to accompany the presentation…
(Unlike some (many?), I make no attempt to write down every last article, preposition, and ‘uh’ that escapes the presenter’s mouth. Just the highest of the highlights.)
The worst I’ve seen was a tinyURL redirect to a LMGTFY animated redirect to a Google search, instead of just responding like a normal, not passive-aggressive person to a legitimate question.
Yeah, another vote against Death By Powerpoint. It CAN be useful, especially if you just use it to show your talking points, or helpful/relevant illustrations. Dated a girl whose church had a setup like that, including monitors sitting on the front row of the pews so the guy speaking could glance down and not lose his place. It was actually helpful because I tend to zone out if given a lot of audio and nothing visual to back it with.
What I do NOT like are totally unnecessary slide shows, or slide shows that are way to content-dense to be useful vs. using some other medium. In my office, the bane of my existence is when someone sends an email saying “We’re having a cookout on Friday at 11 o’clock at the smoke pit!”, accompanied by a powerpoint slide saying “We’re having a cookout on Friday at 11 o’clock at the smoke pit!” Bonus points for me having very limited storage space in my email inbox, and these slides always filling it up with info that was included in the freaking email I had to open before I could get to the slides!
That seemed to be the policy at my old job. Every class or had to include a PowerPoint presentation, with a printout of the slides being passed out. The instructor would then read every slide out loud, with little or no additional material but occasional requests if anyone had any questions.
Gabelstaplerfahrer Klaus. This one took an interesting route; it wasn’t ordered as a safety instruction video, the creator(s) just thought it funny to make it look like something official and then play up the consequences. Now I hear it’s being used as a training video anyway.
