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.