LHC Physics Center bans Powerpoint, switches to whiteboard-only forums
symmetrymagazine.org
symmetrymagazine.org
I find this style absolutely engaging. Presentation software like PowerPoint has its place, but can make it all-too-easy to move through material too quickly. On the other hand, actually drawing and writing things out while discussing the topic slows things down a bit, allowing the audience to engage and understand the topic at a more learning-friendly pace. I personally find this "show me don't tell me" style of white-board presentation refreshing and conducive to my understanding of the topic.
The Physics of Light and Rendering
Infinity is bigger than you think
The real shock for me came later in grad school, when the undergrads (these were all upperclassmen) all basically expected that you'd provide them with the printouts of your slides, and therefore did nothing in class. They'd sit there, diddle on their laptops or phones, and then get cranky and exasperated when you'd tell them, "no, sorry...there are no slides. you have to take notes."
Learning is simply better when you have to write things down. You're engaging your eyes, your ears and your brain...and you're well aware when you're goofing off. I wish colleges would ban powerpoint in the classroom, but since powerpoint is an epic crutch for the lecturer as well, I have my doubts that it will ever happen....
I disagree. Learning is better when you aren't able to diddle on your laptop or phone, and having to write things down strongly encourages you not to do those things, but the actual act of writing things down forces you to focus on quickly copying text, which hugely impairs your ability to internalize what was said.
Some people's learning styles might make that less of a problem (i.e. so-called auditory learners might be able to internalize what's being said nearly at the speed it's spoken), but for those of us who need to translate what we hear into our own mental language, constant note-taking substantially hampers the learning process.
The ideal for me is to preview the notes of a lecture before it's given a la Khan Academy, pay full attention during the lecture, occasionally jot down a keyword to trigger the memory of a thought I had during the lecture, and if I didn't have the opportunity to preview the lecture notes then I'll want to be able to access them afterwards to look up anything I don't remember.
Edit: Corrective upvote because you didn't say anything that harms the discussion.
Scanning other people's lecture notes, even if it's the professor, was worth maybe 5-10% of listening and writing the notes.
Learning styles is more or less discredited. IIRC, research indicated that most students respond similarly to the same learning styles. The main difference between students tends to be whether or not they understand previous material.
I'm not saying that different mediums is a bad idea - most students do respond well to diagrams, explanations, examples, practice, etc.
Research supports note taking, so it's probably a good thing for most students. However, it might not be good for all subjects - math and programming requires a lot less memorisation of facts, and a lot more thinking. If you want to understand dynamic programming, simply memorising the key points won't help you much. If you want to learn a new API, then writing down important methods might.
I would have much preferred to receive hand-outs with the same definitions/theorems on it a day or two before the lecture, so that I could have put my full attention on the professor and the material.
In basically all other courses, I only wrote notes when struck by particularly insightful thoughts I wanted to remember later, and my notes as often were about my own reactions as about what the professors were saying. But because I find it easy to focus and pay close attention in lectures, I generally had better recall afterward than most of my peers, even the ones who spent much more time “studying” their notes later.
* * *
By contrast, I had several friends who could only follow lectures by writing notes while in class, because otherwise they found lectures hard to focus on, and because they found that the physical act of writing what they heard to enormously help their later recall (not to mention they had a physical artifact they could refer to afterward).
* * *
I would like to see your sources for the statement “learning styles is more or less discredited”, as it does not align with my experience either as a student, as an observer of other students, or as the son of a school teacher. It seems completely obvious and non-controversial to me that some people have an easier time following verbal conversation than others, that some have an easier time reading/writing, that some people are more attuned to pictures/graphic elements, etc.
Maybe “learning styles” is a bad name for this, and I personally believe that it’s mostly the result of practice and acculturation rather than anything genetic/inherent, but it still remains obviously (to me) true that different students find different modalities and teaching/learning methods more effective.
As for learning styles being discredited ...
Treat education like alternative medicine, and ask for evidence for teaching methods, rather than evidence against. The amount of puffery some educators believe in is amazing. Education researchers are often even worse. Yes, other industries can be just as bad (software included), but that's no excuse. Especially when there is a lot of research on teaching methods, it's just routinely ignored by the theorists.
For a review on learning styles, see http://steinhardtapps.es.its.nyu.edu/create/courses/2174/rea...
There's a huge body of literature concerning learning styles, but the actual evidence often tends to contradict the hypothesis.
If you pick any popular teaching method, and search for it and the word "evidence", it's often pretty dire.
Yes, some students say they prefer one learning style, especially if you ask them (which is kind of a loaded question). But they don't seem to individually benefit more than other students. There's exceptions, I guess. Students with visual impairments.
You could probably find evidence supporting the use of mixed mediums (show 'em, tell 'em, make 'em do it themselves), but that's different to saying "show some students, and tell others".
""" We concluded that any credible validation of learning-styles-based instruction requires robust documentation of a very particular type of experimental finding with several necessary criteria. First, students must be divided into groups on the basis of their learning styles, and then students from each group must be randomly assigned to receive one of multiple instructional methods. Next, students must then sit for a final test that is the same for all students. Finally, in order to demonstrate that optimal learning requires that students receive instruction tailored to their putative learning style, the experiment must reveal a specific type of interaction between learning style and instructional method: Students with one learning style achieve the best educational outcome when given an instructional method that differs from the instructional method producing the best outcome for students with a different learning style. """
I guess I can agree that anyone trying to sell specific materials to teachers may not have compelling evidence that it’s useful in practice. But that’s true of nearly all education materials ever, anywhere.
This seems like a pretty solid summary:
""" However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all. """
I found that when tutoring people (and from conversations with my mother, it sounds like this is generally the case for any kind of teaching) the key thing is to try a variety of methods, and try to engage with the student to come up with an explanation / set of exercises which helps the student to come to an understanding. In mathematics (my tutoring experience), it’s important to come up with some kind of mental model which helps them fit pieces together. I’ve found that some students have an easier time with motion-kinesthetic types of models, and other students have an easier time with 2d-visual types of models, and other students are just really good at making proof-style symbolic chains of logic, instead of trying to first make explicit graphic/geometric models. But I have absolutely no idea how this could be turned into a useful scientific study, since it involves direct back-and-forth dialog and improvised explanations, etc.
> There's evidence for note taking, as I previously said. The main difference may have been that you had a good grounding in the subject, so taking basic notes would have been a waste of time.
I guess we are talking about different kind of lectures. My experience comes from 5 years of mathematical courses with very dense material. Just taking "basic notes" doesn't cut it there, because only an approximation of a definition is mostly worthless. And regarding proofs, if I understand the subject good enough that I can boil down the essential steps of a proof while seeing it for the first time then I don't really need to take notes at all. So I'm actually always forced to copy everything from the blackboard (if there are no official lecture notes).
And in these situations my brain is blocked with drawing characters instead of processing what is actually happening behind those characters. Yet, I do have friends that copy everything down, even if there are official lecture notes, because according to them it helps them processing the content. Whether a classification in auditory, etc. types is reasonable or not I don't know, but from this experience alone I find it obvious that people learn in different ways.
I basically got a page of text, but I had no idea what it meant - worse for mathematics.
Since I'm back at uni again, I've been trying various lecturer absorption styles, and trying to keep detailed notes still has the same problem - I can't actually follow what's being said. To an extent I don't even hear it.
This article[1] asserts that the style of teaching should fit the content, not a vague notion of learning styles, and the best teaching should cater to students' background knowledge, interests, and abilities – all real and definable things.
[1]http://www.changemag.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/September-Oc...
Learning anatomy is easy--I know, but any subjects will work with the incorporation of a drawing on each page(in your hand writing)
Learing to put up static and dynamic websites(what I am currently doing) makes visual remberance almost impossible.
I have found that learing Java, RoR, bootstrap, ect. was very are for my previous way of memorizing. I have now resorted to downloading courses I need. I'm too old to sit through twenty hours of instruction. Sixty percent seems redundant, or an instructor tacking about his personal life. I found an answer.
The answer, for me, was the Faster feature on VLC. If the teacher has good diction you can get speeds up to 1.60x. This depends on the instructor of course. David Mann(wrong spelling), who teaches cs 75 at Harvard is perfect for this type of speed learning. Don't get me wrong--David s a brilliant teacher, but I found I could speed up his lectures and the subject made more sense. I'm using David as an example because he as perfect diction. I tried this on foreign teachers and it did not work--because I was not used to their diction.
Oh, yea, if you are totally new to programming--listen to lectures on your iPod. You will be surprised how much you retain while exercising, or sone other mundane activity. Yes--you will miss the visual, but you will get the buzz words and when you go back to the lectures there are much easier to understand--at sometimes 1.7x speed.
For youtube, I always yget the videos in /tmp and watch using mplayer. I use the speed-up often.
Some searching also pulls results from a few years ago with similar headlines.
On the other hand, I have often found PowerPoint based presentations to be boring and uninspiring. I remember a class on Thermodynamics from college that I found so boring for this reason that I nearly flunked it.
The best classes I have taken have been once which are primarily PowerPoint based with instructor jumping onto a whiteboard to flesh something out as required. PowerPoint provides the peace of mind that it will all be available if I need to refer to it later and working on whiteboard brings in the engagement and chance to go off track in between.
But the better solution is that you watch the class w/o having to stop paying attention to write, maybe take notes for important stuff, and the class is also recorded and available in your uni website (like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3nbY3hIDLQ ... can't be that expensive to put a camera and a big red button "start recording" in each room. Could even be a student project...)
(Sal Khan also mentions that his nephews preferred him on Youtube than in-person because they could pause and rewind).
(And by the way, I hate that universities that teach technology aren't themselves automatized, with superb intranet, etc...)
Where does it say "frantically writing" is good? Sorry, I have no idea what you think you're replying to.
It is not a direct reply to what timr wrote, but to where his/her sentiment leads with lectures that are densely packed with information. I've had quite a few classes where the lecturer "didn't believe in lecture notes" because "you will be so much more attentive" and "learn so much more when you write stuff down". As I still needed all the precise definitions and wordings of the theorems I did end up frantically copying the lecture.
There doesn't seem to be an overlap of discussion. Writing down what you know (esp. in your own words) causes reinforcement of long term memories is a well established scientific fact. Ofcource reviewing notes is also critical in strengthening those memories so that you recall precise details rather than vague ideas.
You're talking about not being overwhelmed with taking notes - which again, nobody was claiming is a good thing.
I agree that information like formulas, equations, definitions, etc should definitely be provided without having the student write them down and introduce errors of their own.
If the pace and level of a lecture is such that you can both listen and write things down, then yes, I'd agree that having the extra check is helpful. When you re-create an argument or diagram on paper you force yourself to work out the wrinkles and pay attention to the details in a way that you never do if you're just staring at a slide. However, not all lectures work that way unless you consistently take classes below your level. Sometimes you get hung up on a concept and you're forced to do two things at once:
1) copy the text & diagrams verbatim
2) understand the material
where #1 is significantly more cognitively demanding than reproducing an argument that you already understand (unless you have photographic memory, you look back and forth and back and forth) to the point that it inhibits #2, which creates a further need for #1 in a spiral of uninterrupted misery and needless failure.
This is where premade notes shine. They don't have to be a .ppt (I'd prefer if they were TeX sheets or a book chapter, assuming the book chapter actually corresponds to the same material) but they have to be there if you want students to be able to occasionally focus 100% on what you're saying.
Looking back on my LiveScribe archive, I notice a paradoxical trend: I took significantly better notes in classes that had support from solid permanent materials. Why? Because I was able to stop taking notes, focus, and fill things in later when appropriate as opposed to trying and failing to do #1 and #2 at the same time.
In my case, it's probably not possible just in terms of the way my brain is wired to listen-comprehend and write at the same time (this isn't an exaggeration. As a separate example, I can't speak/listen at all while I'm playing videogames).
If a teacher gave boring PowerPoint presentations and then refused to provide them to their students, that did hugely impact the way students viewed them and the class. It feels like resources are being withheld and amplifies the feeling that the class is just jumping through hoops, a game to be gamified, not something to be taken seriously. Sort of like extremely restrictive DRM on music or games--it just feels disrespectful.
That said, nobody is required to give you copies of their slides, just like they're not required to give you a free copy of the course text, or allow you to record the lecture and sell it online. And while you're free as an adult to disregard any course you choose, the instructor is not required to make your life easier to earn your attention. If you don't like the terms of the deal, you can choose not to take the class.
On the other hand I find it kind of disrespectful to waste my time writing down the official notes instead of using that time to understand what the lecturer is trying to teach me, when those notes exist digitally or could be just scanned from a master copy. For some people at least copying and listening to the lecture are mutually exclusive.
This may come as a surprise to people of a certain age, but the instructor's job is not to appease you.
It is not "disrespectful" to ask you to do some work in class. If the instructor believes that you'll learn more effectively by taking notes (and yes, most students will), they're entitled to do anything they wish to make that happen. It's their classroom, not yours. If you want someone to coddle your unique snowflake needs, pay for a tutor. No one is chaining you to a desk.
But hey...I do love the sense of indignant consumer entitlement ("your job is to make me happy!"), coupled with the sense of absolute helplessness ("you can't possibly ask me to choose a different product!"). It really defines the current generation of students.
True, but totally unrelated to the text you quoted from the parent post above.
* If the instructor believes that you'll learn more effectively by taking notes (and yes, most students will), they're entitled to do anything they wish to make that happen*
Including beating you with a metal chain and depriving you of food and water?
It's their classroom, not yours. If you want someone to coddle your unique snowflake needs, pay for a tutor. No one is chaining you to a desk.
It's all a question of perspective. When I've taught, I've always tried to keep in mind that not everyone learns the same way, learns at the same rate, or needs the same inputs. But if I, as an instructor, want everyone to learn (and I do) then it is incumbent on me to, within reason, adapt to the needs of the individuals in the room.
But hey...I do love the sense of indignant consumer entitlement ("your job is to make me happy!"), coupled with the sense of absolute helplessness ("you can't possibly ask me to choose a different product!"). It really defines the current generation of students.
Bah... people have been making comments like this about "the current generation of students" for probably as long as their have been students. And students have been complaining (rightly) that some teachers are terrible teachers and/or terrible human beings, for as long as there have been students and teachers. Nothing has changed.
Definitely true for me. As an undergraduate, I found the following method to be most successful. I attended every class, transcribed the lecture in my own words as it was taught, and pre-read (once) the next lectures textbook stuff. When exam time came, I only had to review my notes the night before the eXam.
Come to think of it, I still have fairly good recall of the knowledge I gained using that method (many years hence). The memorization stuff, tho, I have to practice on trivia sites to recall.
We're talking about learning, so, of course, ymmv.
[1] don't know how, maybe a suit with VR goggles in a game with tweaked physics and different limb constraints, anything to throw your habits off.
When this happens often enough, students internalize that lecture is a waste of time and they can learn better themselves. Some won't even show up, others will show up purely to get attendance credit but do something else.
For people to listen, lecture needs to provide something that simply reading a book doesn't.
The best thing is having the slides before the lesson in pdf and keeping notes on a tablet. I take freeform notes on the slides with a pen and then I rewrite them at home in text boxes on the slides. Notes are searchable at home (Linux) and at work (windows) with DocFetcher, and the tablet sync happens with btsync.
Everything is automated, I can watch the presentation and keep complete and meaningful notes. The professor is very good and he keeps mentioning details and intuitions that I would not have time absorb or note if I spent all my time rewriting math equations that are all over the internet. This is for a math heavy course but I think it applies to most type of courses.
If non-technical speakers spent less time faffing around before the session making awful looking powerpoints, and more time learning how to speak engagingly, the world would be a much better place.
This said as an Audio/Visual Operator who has spent hundreds of hours at a sound-desk watching technically inept speakers fail to impress - no matter how flashy the animations.
The worse thing over the last few years is 'Prezi'. It's a powerpoint alternative which ostensibly makes it easier to make awesome looking graphics.
The 2 problems with it are that it's a hell of a lot harder to actually present on a second screen, so you end up having to drag windows around, and that speakers are still under the impression that because you have swooshes and zooms and text folding inside other text, suddenly it's more likely for people to find the presentation content interesting.
The trouble with BAD technology, is how do you fight it? The normal way is by competition - making better tech. But when the concept itself is wrong, but somehow culturely accepted...? Any ideas?
We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations.
A good start that I've tried was to make a 10-foot-by-10-foot drawing on GoogleDocs, and then arrange all my content within that one slide. Since it's a two-dimensional canvas, there's plenty of opportunities for putting related topics close to each other, even if you talk about them at separate times. It's also effective to put loops in your procession, so that you return to a topic that you covered earlier, reiterating its significance and reminding the audience of it. (Another advantage is that you can save it as a PDF. Then open it in a program, such as Chrome, which lets you zoom in as far as you want. You'll never have to worry about text being too small to read again!)
There were a few things wrong with them (painful to look at while operating, and the bulbs tended to burn out if you moved them around while turned on) but fundamentally I don't think they were broken technology. Overhead projectors would be well complimented by computer projectors, but computer projectors make a poor replacement for them. Attempts to replicate the advantages of overhead projectors on computer projectors always fall flat, as far as I have seen.
I think the demise of overhead projectors is an example of a regression caused by our tendency to have rose-tinted glasses whenever considering more technological alternatives to existing technology.
The advantage of these over overhead projectors would still be pretty small though (really only the being blinded and replacement bulbs issue), so you would need to ensure that the system is rock-solid reliable. If not, then you've just made it worse by making it more advanced.
Isn't that what hyperlinks do? Perhaps I don't understand what you mean.
What I liked about this approach was that you start out from your main content -- perhaps it's a summary or overview -- then you go off into a sub-topic, and then you come back to the overview so how the sub-topic is related to the whole is constantly being reminded to the viewers.
So yes, that kind of thing is what I'm going for (but I'm no expert -- I would love to hear more ideas!)
I'm a high school teacher, and I had a rule for a while whenever students wanted to make powerpoint presentations. They had to build on-screen navigation into their presentation, just as if they were building a website. When they were giving their presentation, they had to use the on-screen navigation, instead of clicking forward and back. The navigation had to be semantic, it couldn't be just "next" and "previous".
Presentations were interesting, because people were free to interrupt with questions such as, "Your data seemed to show xyz, can you explain how your conclusion of abc really follows from your data?" Then students could click right over to the data part of their presentation, without flipping through all the slides in between.
Like most things, the problem is how a tool is used, not the tool itself.
Yes, I absolutely agree with that, and should have said that in my earlier comment. Thanks for bringing that up.
My problem is with the presentations, not with the tool itself.
However, I've never actually seen somebody give a non-linear PowerPoint presentation. TBH, I don't think very many people know how to do this. (including me -- but thanks for pointing this out, I will definitely spend some time figuring out how to do it).
This makes me wonder whether the problem with PowerPoint is that it makes it easy for people to be lazy with their presentations.
It's pretty straightforward. Simple approach:
- Make a textbox.
- Add a word for each page you want to link to.
- Highlight the word.
- Insert -> hyperlink -> Place in this document.
- Copy that textbox to every page.
Here's a simple example. I put it on github, because I don't use dropbox, and I haven't heard good things about slideshare.
http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/
(I really dislike these presentations)
The "vertical slides" add a bit of hierarchy, but again, I don't feel that they add any non-linearity to the presentation.
Now, if say the 15th slide referred back to some content in the 8th, or if the 3rd-6th slides were all interrelated -- and this structure was reflected in the structure of the presentation -- then I would be enthusiastic.
So tl,dr; I agree with you -- I dislike these presentations.
A.1, B.1, A.2, B.2
Problem solved.
Solution finding in a quantum computer? They're solutions are supposedly parallel and non-linearisable. Reading the solutions I guess forces linearity.
There's also relativistic issues but you can solve those by saying there's an implicit "within any particular Inertial Frame of Reference".
I think perhaps what you mean is anything that we experience we experience linearly; is that a better way of saying it?
What I am saying is that:
- most (all?) topics are not 1-dimensional: they deal with multiple issues with many complicated interrelations and interactions. Let's call them multi-dimensional.
- many people build 1-dimensional presentations using PowerPoint (and related tools).
- treating a multi-dimensional topic as 1-dimensional makes for a poor, confusing presentation.
To connect this with your point: the hard part of building a presentation is mapping an n-dimensional topic onto a 1-dimensional medium (time), while sacrificing the minimum amount of accuracy. Based on personal experience, many people don't spend much time on this part; they just throw a bunch of information onto slides in an arbitrary order. And so this smacks of circular reasoning to me:
> If you are going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2, and B.1 before point B.2, but you will speak about point B.1 before point A.2, then just put them in that order. Problem solved.
But how do you know you're going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2? Figuring that out is the hard part!
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All this is just my subjective opinion, of course. :)
We're going to view them in some order, just put them in that order and call it a day. If there is no order, then random order should be just fine. After all, what if you really needed more than two dimensions? You'd have to compress your ideas into a two-dimensional space anyway. Might as well make it one-dimensional and therefore less confusing.
I'm a teacher, we have those in all our classrooms. You can prepare some sparse screens in advance, literally just starter points or sentences/images. Then annotate as audience throw up ideas. IW software allows export to pdf so email/upload during talk.
If you decide you really do need the IW, then try to find a local school/college that will let you play with theirs for an hour after classes. You will get a good idea of what the software can do, and you can find out about the drawbacks of various makes.
One concrete advantage of an IW might be annotating actual screens. Most IW software automatically grabs screen of driving computer then allows you to write over the static image. All the IW software I have used (smartboard, active edition, the dolphin ones) allow saving of whiteboard stacks as PDFs.
I wouldn't be so sure. Scott McNealy famously "banned" PowerPoint at Sun in 1997 and people said the same thing then.
I know. But here's a guy being hopeful. :-)
[0] http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html - see [1] for context.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pa... - see [2] for an alternative viewpoint.
Like people with a new 4-wheel drive car, driving in the snow for the first time...
The solution isn't no PowerPoint. The solution is teach people how to communicate. How to present to both technical and nontechnical audience. How to write an executive summary / elevator pitch.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to use powerpoint well. Hell, it's possible to write world class code in Perl. It's possible to build skyscrapers in a swamp. That doesn't mean you should force yourself to do so. It's always smarter to stack the odds in your favor as much as possible.
1. People make mistakes on the whiteboard
2. You can't save it and review later
3. Even if you write everything down, it would still be less information than what someone could add in the Powerpoint
4. Powerpoint is much more legible
5. It is easier to go at your own pace during and after the presentation if someone is using a Powerpoint. If someone is using a white/blackboard they are going to erase the last part very quickly after they finished writing it down.
In Bio classes, almost everyone used Powerpoint. Those who did the blackboard approach had the worst lectures mostly because they wrote down very little and just talked about concepts.
Also, your teachers probably teach the same course over and over. They don't do spontaneous, once-in-a-life-time lecture to you. They know what they have to teach today and tomorrow. They know exactly what proof to use. Unlike university lecture, the discussion forum at LHC in the article are probably one-time open brownbag. They raise an interesting question, they talk and they leave the room.
True, but you do vary presentation to allow for audience. I use 'room temperature' questions early on; rows of confused faces and I go into the slow siding; rapid fire answers and extensions and I shift into the express route. Mixed reactions and I have been known to split the whiteboard down the middle.
So less a linear video tape and more a series of responses deployed depending on feedback from the class
I am teaching below University level though, and smaller classes (15 to 25 people).
In case you haven't seen this configuration, the boards are mounted on rails that allow them to slide up above each other when you're done with one, with three of these set ups next to each other giving you a 3x3 grid of blackboards. Smaller lecture rooms have a 2x2 grid which lasts quite long also.
And some stuff are just clearer on slides... I don't really see a lot of benefits in whiteboard-only lectures. Combination of whiteboard and slides are best.
I can still think of some great people who don't use slides but it's rare and a few people do it well (Gilbert Strang comes to my mind[1]).
And those that present wholly new ideas (research seminars, conferences,) where you can just read the paper or the preprint for details.
The only time I've seen something on the board that I really had to copy down to keep an copy of was exercises and their solutions.
Overhead projector lectures are the best of both worlds. You can make pre-prepared foils but modify them on the fly, and create new ones on the fly as naturally as you can write on a blackboard.
But was it fine? If you are delivering to five people, probably. What about 10, 20, 30, 100, 300?
These are the things to consider when giving a presentation:
1. your target audience
2. time constraint
3. technology and tools available
4. scope of your presentation (is this a lecture, a short 15-minute progress report, or a workshop)
“Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,” says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and a co-organizer of the forum. “We wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.”
You see, if you are giving a two-hour workshop to a small group of scientists which everyone knows each other, the discussion can become interesting. But if you are giving a 30-minute workshop, a 30-minute talk to a larger group of people, whiteboard-free-style presentation breaks down.
The main problem is that only a handful of people will fully comprehend what the speaker is up to regardless of which method. Some people are slower at picking up new ideas. It could be experience, language barrier (and sometimes it's the speaker's accent) or misunderstanding. People fear of asking dumb questions in front of a large group of experts so in the end it's just an interaction of the speaker with a handful of experts. The rest will just nod and follow on.
Neither powerpoint nor whiteboard could solve the main problem entirely. But with powerpoint, one could traverse back and forth and audience does not have to suffer illegible handwriting (and in large group people could be sitting in the far back). This is something whiteboard-only discussion can't.
So if they run a small group discussion, chalkboard is fine. But if they run a large group discussion, I argue start with slides and supplement with whiteboard. Slides should be there to deliver textual information, graphical information which are hard to explain or to follow on a whiteboard.
That's very different to presenting in real time with just a whiteboard to write on.
1. It forces you to think more about what you want to say and how you're going to write it down beforehand.
2. It sets a uniform pace for your presentation (writing stuff down is harder than advancing slides)
3. It lets your audience follow the train of thought that lead you to the results your presenting and allows your content to unfold before their eyes.
4. It invites participation and allows for easy modification and adaption of your content during your presentation (try that with Powerpoint).
That said, structuring a good whiteboard talk/presentation is hard work too and I've seen many people (including professors) fail at it.
We can't realistically ban Powerpoint, since as experimentalists we have to discuss lots of graphics and plots. What we did try once was to use our lab books instead. Every (PhD, Masters) student would write a summary of their week's progress in their lab books, including printed out plots, and we would project it with one of these old-fashioned book-projectors. It was nice because you could also go back and look at the details in the lab book, and it would give you an incentive to keep your books correctly. Unfortunately, it became unpractical as our group grew, and also because we have a lot of collaborators from other groups who are connected via video.
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* Or Libreoffice, Keynote or Latex Beamer
Also note that it's pretty hard to give numerical results to a computation on the blackboard. A plot generated by a computer program and embedded on a Beamer slide is optimal in this case.
My handwriting is improving, and I do try to improve. The fact you didn't glean that from my, albeit curt, response is hardly cause for putting words into my mouth. I appreciate the feedback though.
I'm dysgraphic and have typed every school report in since 3rd grade, so perhaps my view is biased on this matter. I remember being unable to learn cursive and my teachers telling my parents "Don't worry, by the time he's an adult everyone will type everything.". Their prediction has held true. Cursive is dead, removed from common core. Handwriting is up next. In my adult life, the only thing I've had to hand write other than my signature has been a few checks.
Forcing hand writing is like forcing modern day car drivers to only take a horse and buggy to work. They could get better at it, but why?
GP actually said: " This is dumb; my handwriting sucks. I'd hate to give a hand-written talk."
In any case, with few exceptions tuition money does not get used to conduct any kind of research. Most of it will go towards some combination of paying for administration, facilities, and teaching fees for non-tenured lecturers (in the parlance of the US system). In fact, at most Tier I research institutions research grants are actually subsidizing educational expenses with various mechanisms built in to most awards requiring expenditures to this effect.
Let me offer a different modeling of academy as a market: The product isn't education, but the improvement of society, both in the near term, by fruits of research, and in the long term, by having more and better educated people around. So the students aren't the clients, but the product; which is paid for mostly in public funds (there is no such thing as privatize research. Almost all significant research has some public sponsored portion -- it's just too expensive to do without).
Therefore, some countries even go and make higher education free, or near free.
But, one can see you can increase your earnings, by also charging the students, as their graduation not only improve society as a a whole, but gives them personal gain too. So you do that, but it's more like marketing a bi-product, and not a product itself. Further evidence is that almost all PhDs are free to the student, even in the US (or at least, for promising students.)
For non-libertarians, the above is a compelling reason for fully subsidizing education.
More here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_shuttle_disaster
I'm a teacher of economics and the only time I use slides is when I have to present a lot of data or literal text like the statements of theorems. Even in these situations I think distributing printed handouts works much better. But that involves logistics and expense.
I have used the ideas behind http://www.presentationzen.com/ with good results.
Based on that, my mom setup a service to build that kind of presentations at http://www.emilypresenta.com/ (the site is in spanish for now), including finding, buying the photos/icons and the provide a basic layout for the talking part.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great, but this is quite a small group we're talking about. I guess this is what the meetings look like:
I find LaTeX and TikZ perfect for that. If you're comfortable with programmatic markup, it's easy to produce detailed incremental diagrams with minimal effort, without the usual Powerpoint approach of "copy, paste, edit second copy, repeat, hope you never need to systematically change the base diagram".
My preferred style was to iteratively build equations over a few slides, explaining the pieces as I went, and having a legend for coefficients/terms.
I attend occasional academic talks at the nearby university, and am seeing a growing trend towards simply pasting equations into PowerPoint in whatever their original format, such as MatLab or some programming language.
But I work in a business setting right now, and I've learned that equations in a presentation are taboo. A lot of non technical people assume if they see an equation, that the work is incomplete, otherwise you'd give an answer instead of an equation.
Jeez. I mean, I agree that it's poor form to stuff a presentation full of equations, but what a dumb reason that is... :(
just wondering if the spreadsheet will be the only survivor