This week has seen much presentation design work. I began with a presentation offered by the book's authors. This presentation embodies everything with which I disagree when it comes to presentation design. See it below...
You'll see that the presentation is loaded with bullet points and much text on each slide. I do not think this is effective presentation design at all. I think the information is solid, but do not that there are more than 30 slides attempting to convey an entire book chapter. I question the efficacy of providing a ready-made Cliff's Notes-esque presentation. If this is designed for instructor use, is that encouraging the instructor to provide this for students?
So then I had to ask myself. Do I provide this for the students? If so, do I provide it ahead of time, after the lecture, or print it and give them handouts?
I am doing a bit of an experiment. Since I am not using this presentation except as an influence on my own presentation, it serves no harm to provide it for them. What I wonder is, will they actually read the book chapter?
For chapter 2's presentation, I gave it to them when we got to about the middle of the chapter. To be honest, it just worked out that way since we didn't cover quite as much as I had expected to cover throughout the course of a few days in class. Time goes quickly, I'd say...
So here is my presentation over the same material. In mine there is some overlap with chapter 2 but towards the middle I move onto Chapter 3.
After the presentation was done, I showed them a video of Sir Ken Robinson at the TED conference. This presentation is about whether schools kill creativity and is some of the best time you can spend. It's 18 minutes and is really funny, so I'd encourage you to watch it.
What I notice about him is that he doesn't move much, doesn't use his hands too much, and doesn't use a presentation at all. This helps me understand that a presentation is not always needed and is often harmful. This has radically affected my opinions on presentation design and is supported by the research in my bibliography.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Great example of a "good" and a "bad" PowerPoint presentation, Chris. You have made significant improvements.
Thanks for sharing your work with the class. I hope you will continue to do that.
I also love the two examples. I know I'm guilty of creating the bad examples--partly because I'm using PPT as a tool for collecting my ideas when I should be using the notes feature in the software instead of the slides themselves. Thanks for the reminder.
Post a Comment