Having talked at length about my theories of how to do an effective PowerPoint talk, I probably ought to provide some examples. These are converted to PDF because it’s more generally readable than PPT, and because the files are slightly smaller. The conversion is done using CutePDF writer, which does something to the files that occasionally causes Acrobat to choke, but you should be using FoxIt instead, anyway.
Camp College slides. This is a “simulated lecture” that I did for a summer program here. It’s a 50-minute talk about laser cooling, and runs to 23 slides, though I usually wind up stopping after 19, because there are a lot of liquid nitrogen magic tricks that go with this.
Colgate talk. This is the set of slides I used for a talk at Colgate University several years ago, and is basically my job talk converted to a PowerPoint show (the slides were originally made up in PowerPoint, and printed onto overhead transparencies). It’s 32 slides, and closer to an hour of talk time. The file is “ColgateShort.pdf” because I trimmed out another dozen or so slides from more technical versions of the talk, that I held in reserve in case there were questions.
I’m very happy with the undergrad-audience version of my current research talk (“Counting Atoms for Astrophysics: Atom Traps, Neutrino Detectors, and Radioactive Background Measurements,” available for colloquia at your institution…). Warning: it’s very image-heavy, and the PDF version comes out at 2.3 MB. That runs 26 slides, again for an hour-long presenation, and is probably the best of the talks I have available in electronic form.
If you’d like to critique my talk-design skills, you know where the comments are.
http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/suslick/seminaronseminars.html
Of course, it’s hard to tell how good the talks are by looking at the slides — it depends too much on what you actually say and how you say it. I can imagine horrible talks with these slides and I can imagine great talks with these slides. The slides are not the talk (now, if I could just convince our students of that).
I second Uncle Al’s suggestion. Prof. Suslick’s annual Seminar on Seminars is always fun to attend.
I only looked at the Camp College slides, but I see nothing you couldn’t have done at the blackboard and then the students would be making eye contact with you instead of staring at a screen. I did this kind of stuff all the time without .ppt and I don’t see a thing here that is made better by using it. Not a thing.
So how did .ppt make your lecturing better, other than you felt more comfortable? I am very surprised at the vigor of your reaction about .ppt and your defensiveness. If you like it, go ahead and use it. It does affect the format but maybe that’s a good format for you. I don’t mind. I don’t like it at all. I think it reinforces bad habits in lecturing and more power to you if you can resist that. Or should I say, more powerpoint to you . . .
revere said:
I only looked at the Camp College slides, but I see nothing you couldn’t have done at the blackboard and then the students would be making eye contact with you instead of staring at a screen. I did this kind of stuff all the time without .ppt and I don’t see a thing here that is made better by using it. Not a thing.
*************************************************************************
Maybe I am new school, but I find a good presenter draws me in and guides me to look at the screen when they want me to. When a lecture was on the blackboard, I rarely looked at the professor but rather I found myself busily trying to write down and decipher what the professor was writing.
As for the slides- I do like how you vary the orientation. The use of photos is great since people make a better connection when they can place a face with a name.
The research talk has too many bullet points for my taste. Take away a good joke with the undergrad there for scale by writing it out. I am the type who probably goes too far the other way though. My slides after the title are all figures, diagrams, citations exclusively until the future directions. Take away a good joke with the undergrad there for scale by writing it out.
Also for the research talk, with the blue going to white background, I find myself looking either at the top or bottom of the slide and have trouble focussing on the meat of the slide.
Overall nice, not cluttered, clean talks.
I only looked at the Camp College slides, but I see nothing you couldn’t have done at the blackboard and then the students would be making eye contact with you instead of staring at a screen.
I don’t understand this. if Chad were doing this on a blackboard, he’d have spent much more of his own time looking at the blackboard instead of at the audience. How would that enable eye contact?
Rob: You turn around and look at them. Look, this is about lecturing styles. My style was very interactive and I used the board. When I changed to powerpoint it changed my style. There are good points and bad points about the change. I am impressed more by the bad points than the good points, but that isn’t the issue. The issue is that powerpoint isn’t just a tool, as Chad claims. It’s a tool that affects how the product comes out. Like most tools.
If you like .ppt, use it, by all means. Get good at it. Make it your own. But don’t think it isn’t having an effect except to make your lectures better. It may or may not make them better, but it sure as hell is making them different.
Look, this is about lecturing styles. My style was very interactive and I used the board. When I changed to powerpoint it changed my style. There are good points and bad points about the change. I am impressed more by the bad points than the good points, but that isn’t the issue. The issue is that powerpoint isn’t just a tool, as Chad claims. It’s a tool that affects how the product comes out. Like most tools.
I don’t understand how using PowerPoint would force you to be any less interactive, nor do I see why using a chalkboard would be more interactive. The degree of interactivity is orthogonal to the choice of media.
The only thing that I can think of that might give the impression that the PowerPoint slides are less interactive is that the transition to PDF loses the animation. Those slides don’t flash up one full page at a time– the text and pictures are revealed a bit at a time.
But I don’t see anything in PowerPoint that forces the lecture to be less interactive. The only limiting factor about it, for me, is that I need to keep walking back over to the podium to click to the next slide (we have wireless mice, but they’re not very reliable). If anything, I lean toward Rob’s position, that writing on the blackboard is even less participatory.
OK. Let’s agree to disagree. But I will say one pet peeve of mine is the slow “revealing” of the next points that people used to do with overheads by moving an opaque piece of paper down the page a little at a time and now do with powerpoint. I (and many others) find it very distracting. If you don’t want them “reading ahead” don’t put it up on that slide. But that’s not a .ppt issue. Just a pet peeve.
I don’t like .ppt, obviously, but I use it for a variety of reasons. I’m glad I satarted the conversation because it was entertaining and a diversion. It also generated a surprising amount of heat. You can’t do that with religion or evolution on ScienceBlogs so it’s nice to know there are some controversial topics left around here!