EclectEcon

from Craig Newmark, and his blog, Newmark's Door, I eventually came to this. I strongly/highly recommend the whole thing. It is very persuasive.

In my own speeches I try to avoid the boring PowerPoints with the bullets. I either put up pictures of really hot actors (by which I mean, hot-looking: Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, etc.), or puppies, or jokes, and I think I have the whole bullet thing isolated to one slide with three bullet points. Of course, when I’m so busy telling jokes and showing pictures of hot actors it’s hard to find time to get to the bullets.

In 2003 Edward R. Tufte, famous for his brilliant and beautiful books on the visual display of information, decided he had had just about enough PowerPoint for a lifetime, and launched a campaign to rid the world of this scourge. “Alas,” Tufte wrote, “slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.”

I hated prepared overheads when I was a student because I never knew whether to try to copy down what was on the overheads or to listen to the professor and take notes. My experiences in the past 54 years have been that profs who used prepared overheads either read too much from them, making them boring, or don't read enough from them, making them confusing.

Now, with prepared PowerPoint lectures, the only way I know of that they even come close to working is the way one of my former students uses them --- he does partial slides and sells booklets made up of them. Then he expects the students to follow along and fill in the blanks and graphs and tables.

I find that a bit rigid and confining, myself, but I can see that it at least avoids most of the major pitfalls of PowerPoint and prepared overhead presentations.

I actually gave a PowerPoint presentation once. I had little idea what I was doing, but the folks who had organized the conference insisted I do it, and they had things very well prepared. It went okay, I guess. But it was mostly graphs and data, and I talked around them.