Geez, folks, nobody uses slide rules any more!
In some circumstances it can make sense to start a presentation with “meta” information.
e.g. “In this presentation I’ll be summarising CT scanning, with the focus on clinical practice.
There are a few mathematical formulae, though they are just included for interest and you won’t need to memorise them.”
The thing I was whinging about in the OP, was when presentations begin with a list of things which are meaningless for the audience, because they won’t learn what the things are until the presentation begins.
e.g. Imagine you didn’t know what matrices were, and so you go to a presentation intended for beginners to matrices, and the first information thrown at you is a list like this:
Objectives
[ul]
[li]Define matrix[/li][li]Understand matrix transposition[/li][li]Be able to multiply matrices, and know when multiplication is possible[/li][li]Be able to calculate the determinant of a matrix[/li][li]Know how to create transformation matrices, and apply them to vectors[/li][/ul]
Going through a list like this would make sense at the end of a presentation.
But at the start, all the audience can do is either write it down, or let it go over their heads.
It seems like a very specific gripe. But if you google “Objectives Slide”, all you find is pages recommending the practice…
I think you make a good point in that the objectives slide should be in terms the audience can understand.
IME, the kind of people who are usually teaching me about matrices are not very good at understanding how people think and communicate. Maybe that’s why I still don’t know how to put those sample objectives into words a beginner would understand. But if someone could put the effort into doing that, it would probably make the whole presentation go more smoothly. We’d have a better grip on what matrix algebra can help us accomplish.
One thing that struck me is that there’s a difference between giving a presentation and teaching a class. PowerPoint is being used to do what teachers used to do with a blackboard and chalk and overhead projectors and filmstrips. It’s also being used to do quick, punchy, persuasive things in a business context. These are just very different balls of wax.
Imagine if our elementary school math teachers had followed good bullet point practice:
Word problems:
* Train leaves Baltimore, 30 mph
* Train leaves Atlanta 45 mph
* 12 hours
That would not have been very helpful. But PowerPoint can be used to very legibly walk through the steps of solving that word problem without requiring the teacher to write it on the board accurately multiple times per day. I don’t think that’s misuse of PowerPoint just because it doesn’t have the zip of a sales pitch.
Right–there’s an instructor here who uses PowerPoint only to visually cue a block of information that he reads or describes, but that doesn’t appear on the slide. I do some of this, but I try to teach/present in ways that work for people with different learning styles, and I lose the visual learners and the people who don’t track well if I don’t have at least an outline on the slides. In addition, I get nagged for my notes afterward, and since presenting while people are taking notes can slow down a talk or discussion by about half, I tend to just put many of my notes on the PowerPoint but not read every point aloud.
I also sometimes put a paragraph on the slide. PowerPoint slides are too small for the presentation of complex situations, but despite PowerPoint wisdom/cultural rules, it’s really fine to put a 20-point paragraph on a slide if the projection is sufficient. I’m not selling a new kind of toilet paper; I’m presenting material on diagnosis or social services, and that takes more than a flashy graphic and a couple of bullet points.