One thing I'm realizing from the NITLE summit so far is that the talks focused on failure are generally much more effective than those of successes. First, they tend to be funny- it's easier to poke fun at yourself when you look foolish. Second, it's easier to draw parallels in failures- the major successes, with all sorts of structure, collaboration, planning and assessment attached to it can seem awfully daunting when you haven't started down the path, especially when you know the stars won't align as well in your situation. But everyone has some terrible story to tell, and learning how to work around the issues ends up being the real interesting information. Finally, it reinforces the idea that failure is sometimes an option- when you try new things it doesn't always work, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Experiments often fail- it's part of life even if we don't want to admit that we're the ones failing, and it shows ways to bets cut your losses and move on to something new.
I love failure...
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Two visions of Powerpoint
I feel a bit like Jim Anchower since it's been so long since I updated, but Hola again.
I spent a day last week at a Edward Tufte workshop, focused entirely around presenting huge amounts of data in limited spaces, and how Powerpoint is a tool of the devil. Tufte has some good points here- the average bulleted list Powerpoint slide, read in a monotone by a speaker unsure of the material is one of the worst possible ways to get information across to a group. It's boring, slow and information poor. But I have to disagree that this is Powerpoint's fault: it's just a crappy speaker using a tool badly. Just because you're trying to drive a screw with a hammer doesn't mean that a screw is bad way to join things- it's just a crappy way to use the screw.
The NITLE workshop I'm at right now has a variety of people (including me) using a pecha-kucha format for our talks- 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. No more bullet lists, no more reading a slide of text - you don't have the time. 3-4 words and a funny picture or a single graph, that's it. It actually works even better IMHO if you both mess with the timings a bit as well as throw in blank slides to break up the flow- go fast, use the slides either for a bit of data or something to make the audience laugh and talk for the rest
The true irony was watching Mike Winiski from Furman doing a pecha-kucha Powerpoint talk on data visualization, using a lot of Tufte-like examples. He did his much more slowly and carefully than I did mine, and it worked very nicely- just enough to get you thinking about how you might want to do new stuff without bogging down into a boring discussion of how you make or use them. You can do all that off line at lunch, after 6 more talks in the P-K format.
I spent a day last week at a Edward Tufte workshop, focused entirely around presenting huge amounts of data in limited spaces, and how Powerpoint is a tool of the devil. Tufte has some good points here- the average bulleted list Powerpoint slide, read in a monotone by a speaker unsure of the material is one of the worst possible ways to get information across to a group. It's boring, slow and information poor. But I have to disagree that this is Powerpoint's fault: it's just a crappy speaker using a tool badly. Just because you're trying to drive a screw with a hammer doesn't mean that a screw is bad way to join things- it's just a crappy way to use the screw.
The NITLE workshop I'm at right now has a variety of people (including me) using a pecha-kucha format for our talks- 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. No more bullet lists, no more reading a slide of text - you don't have the time. 3-4 words and a funny picture or a single graph, that's it. It actually works even better IMHO if you both mess with the timings a bit as well as throw in blank slides to break up the flow- go fast, use the slides either for a bit of data or something to make the audience laugh and talk for the rest
The true irony was watching Mike Winiski from Furman doing a pecha-kucha Powerpoint talk on data visualization, using a lot of Tufte-like examples. He did his much more slowly and carefully than I did mine, and it worked very nicely- just enough to get you thinking about how you might want to do new stuff without bogging down into a boring discussion of how you make or use them. You can do all that off line at lunch, after 6 more talks in the P-K format.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)