Over at Backreaction, Bee runs through the pros and cons of different presentation methods for academic talks. As she quite correctly notes, both PowerPoint presentations and chalk talks have strengths and weaknesses. You can give a good talk with either, and a bad talk with either.
This does suggest a topic for a reader poll, though, namely, if you have to sit through a bad presentation, which sort of bad presentation would you prefer:
Please note that “I’d tune it out and watch good presentations on the TED website instead” is not an option. Imagine a sealed room with no Internet access of any kind, and you don’t have pen or paper with which to work math problems or doodle on to pass the time. Would you rather be forced to sit through a bad chalk talk or a bad PowerPoint talk?
When a presentation is bad, the means of presentation does not matter. Powerpoint simply makes it easier to be bad. Even posters can be bad, but they have the benefit of allowing you to simply waste no more than a glance. Had a colleague who didn’t understand that stapling a manuscript to the wall did not make it a poster presentation. And the correlation between poor presentations and poor teaching is pretty high.
My answer always dependes on which I’ve seen recently that was worse. I’ve seen horrible chalkboard/whiteboard lectures where the writing was illegible and the lecturer spent the whole three hours with his back to us, muttering incomprehensibly at the board.
I’ve seen PowerPoint lectures given off someone else’s slides, where the lecturer had to stand there for a few minutes to figure out what was going on before proceeding. And then spend a few more minutes trying to figure out why the material was there at all.
I’ve seen people make transparencies of the text and put them up on an old-style overhead projector and have the students– grad students, no less!!!– read paragraphs from it, round-robin style, like they were in fourth grade.
These are all academic/lecture settings, as opposed to conference settings, but the point remains. It ain’t the tools that suck. It’s the users.
Since blackboard talks tend to be more informal, it is generally more acceptable to interrupt and ask for clarifications when the presentation is bad. It is not as if the speaker has to switch to a different medium to explain an unclear point. The speaker may not end up getting through all their material, but it is better to understand some of it than none of it. With PowerPoint it is harder to get the speaker to depart from the prepared order of the talk.
I picked PowerPoint on the assumption that it, at least, would not involve anyone squeaking chalk or markers on the board.
PowerPoint makes me fall asleep. So I’d rather have a blackboard talk, where there’s at least a chance I’ll make it to the end 🙂 Another upside: when the speaker’s back is turned, one can exchange grimaces of exasperation with one’s neighbours.
Matt Leifer @ #3 summed it up well. PowerPoint presentations are almost never interactive with the audience, and when the speaker does allow some interaction, they just become more confusing as the speaker tries to find the page in the presentation that will make the point for them. Or, you just get a “that will be made clear in a later slide” response, and, of course, it never does.
Generally I agree with #3.
But I think language barriers may change this. If someone didn’t speak or understand English very well, I’d rather have a bad Powerpoint than a bad board talk.
The blackboard talk is more interactive, so I use them exclusively when I teach class. When I am giving a formal presentation, I will either just lecture at the people or use powerpoint, but only minimally. I wish that people would remember that the screen is hypnotic and insert a couple of blank slides to limit distractions when the speaker is talking.
Now, of course, you can have bad, nausea-inducing prezis! Yay! Boredom and seasickness! w00t!
HJ
I’ll take blackboard over powerpoints any day.
At least the blackboard presentation can be dynamic.
Really bad powerpoint presentations just lead me to read the slide…first about halfway before the speaker finishes reading it out loud to the audience, and then a second and third time because I’m bored out of my mind.
It sort of depends on what you prefer to do during a bad talk. Ppt talks are usually given in semi-darkness. This makes sleeping easy (perhaps inevitable), but snoring can disrupt the talk. Dark rooms make it harder to work crossword puzzles or sudoku, and easier to spot someone texting.