| Starting a powerpoint deathwatch - more evidence that its time has come... | | Date Created: 09 Jun, 2007, 01:04 PM |
 A week ago, I blogged about my trip to the US and Canada where on Wednesday I presented to the Third International Fear of Flying Conference, at ICAO headquarters in Montreal.
ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) is an arm of the United Nations, and most of the convention took in its huge auditorium where it holds its general assemblies, much like you see in reports about UN activities from New York City.
It was particularly important to have ICAO support for the conference, as it could take any recommendations we made back to airlines and hopefully better support the flying public, who have returned to flying but are becoming increasingly anxious about it.
That anxiety is due to a hassle factor, post 9/11, and there will be an increase in anxiety due to new aircraft increasing the likelihood of very long flights. Since one primary complaint of fearful flyers relates to enclosed spaces and an inability to escape, spending 18 hours in a plane isn't much fun, especially in coach.
Now, in my last entry I forewarned, as much to myself as anyone else, that mine would be the only Mac present, the conference being dominated by Powerpoint and Dells. This was hinted at by the conference organisers asking for Powerpoint stacks to be emailed prior to the conference commencing.
This is a clue of course to their loading all stacks into a laptop sitting by the lecturn on stage, and where each sessions' papers (usually four per session) could be brought together and clicked on to commence. A homepage was delivered with a hotlink to each of the presenters, and it was this homepage, together with logos and brands, which greeted the start of each session.
The session chair could then simply click on the next presenter's name, and their Powerpoint stack would show up on the two huge screens. Why two huge screens?
As it turned out, the conference organisers wanted a permanent video record, so employed a professional video outfit, and the second screen showed a video of the presenter to the right, while his or her slides were shown to the left.
Later in the week, when there were parallel sessions, the huge auditorium had a room divider in place, and each new room (now two) had its own screen.
I really disliked the setup.
It meant that presenters stood behind a podium on a stage, with the huge screen behind and above them to their left. Which meant most looked at the projected screen, only looking down at the laptop to change slides (Some used the supplied remote control affixed to the lecturn).
The laptop in use (a Dell) clearly had Powerpoint presenting in mirror mode, unlike how many of us use Keynote, in presentation mode, as we know Steve Jobs uses too.
This allows you to see the next slide, or next slide's build, and thus permit a greater use of narrative to help you join the slides more seamlessly. Or at least that's how it feels for me.
After three days, did I die of Powerpoint? I certainly felt like I was drowning, and was thrown a lifevest by one other Mac user (out of 150) who was using a 17" MacBook Pro as well as Keynote. But it looked to me when I saw him rehearsing that he was a recent Mac convert (he represented a consumer view of fear of flying, as was a web designer in his day job), and was using Keynote in the Powerpoint tradition: bullet points, loads of text, and overuse of animation and movement, because he could, rather than should.
What I can say is that from what I saw bad Powerpoint remains the order of the day. Or should I say bad powerpoint?
Powerpoint has become the Xerox of its time. In Australia, we use the term "photocopy" for what Americans now use "xerox". A brand has become genericised. Bad powerpoint is a style of using slideware (which could include Keynote) which disobeys many of the rules so far discovered about how humans learn and transfer training.
Tufte refers to it as the Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, which reduced complex ideas down to bullet and sub-bullet points, and the overemphasis on text to deliver messages.
Powerpoint (with a big P), by its inclusion of chintzy clip-art, tacitly encourages their misuse, and the more others use it, the more others will use it. Without thought or question as to whether its appropriate or enhancing of the main message.
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Let me bring you in to a little secret of my presenting philosophy. It's one that guides the construction of my presentations, and why I slave over each slide. It's not for everyone, but then again, nor does everyone want to drive a Mercedes or live by the water. Each to their own.
But when I conceive of a presentation, I have two primary objectives in mind.
One: The maximal transfer of what's in my head to "out there" - into the room or space where the audience or attendees sit, each bringing to the workshop prior knowledge. Sometimes, that prior knowledge is a given, e.g., we're all psychologists, and other times, if it's a mixed audience, there will be other givens less specific.
The point of acknowledging prior knowledge is that it helps make the bridge between it and new knowledge (your presentation's content), hopefully making learning more likely. |
Each time I do a presentation, I'll debrief myself by going over the slides I thought worked, judging by audience reaction, their post-presentation feedback, and my own sense of accomplishment. Then I'll alter the slidestack to reflect the feedback and perhaps add a new slide prompted by the debrief.
Two: I design my presentation as if I desire to wipe powerpoint off the face of the earth.
Huh? Why such hubris you ask?
I'm not talking here of Powerpoint, the Microsoft application. As Edward Tufte has said, it's an OK picture presenter application.
No, I'm talking lower case powerpoint, the style 99% of Powerpoint users have adopted over the years, and which I saw in action in Montreal. You know, all bullet points and text and chintzy clip art, and pixellated jpegs, and corny animation, and ... well, the list goes on.
I want to eliminate it the only way I know how: by showing an alternative means to share my knowledge, so that it becomes difficult for an audience to see the usual fare in the same way from now on. To do this, I need to work hard on my slides, applying the empirical evidence for what works and what doesn't, then rehearse my timings, and practice the slides using a variety of sentences so that if I forget one element, I have a backup plan. That's how and why I don't work from a script.
The result is a presentation that immerses the audience in ideas, concepts, challenges, and emotions. They dare not turn away from the screen lest they miss out on something interesting. If I don't want them looking at the screen while I am speaking directly with them, I'll hit the B key on the Powerbook and reduce the projection image to black.
I am trying to get an audience who comes to my presentation not to sit there hoping to absorb the material without effort, because that won't happen. I want them to have a better chance by helping immerse them in my illustrated ideas, broken down into manageable chunks, where a story is interwoven between slides and speech. This is why rehearsing the slide timings and transitions is so important so as not to "jar" the audience and lose their sense of presence in the story I am telling. |
A number of people approached me after the presentation in Montreal asking what software I had used, because they could see it clearly wasn't Powerpoint. They looked a little dispirited but unsurprised that Keynote is only available on the Mac, but still thanked me for what they had seen and heard.
(I actually held back the most emotion-laden slide which might have sealed the idea I was selling - that with fear of flying, one ignores treating the sensory load in favor of the cognitive load at one's peril - when I didn't show an amateur movie of the December 2004 Tsunami that hit parts of Thailand). |
 The downside to my presentation: It can't be included in the handbook that will be published later, while some of the Powerpoints I saw can easily be transcribed given their total use of text.
At this point, I must tell you an interesting highlight of the Montreal visit. Before I left, I spoke with the producer of a top-rating morning radio show about my impending visit and the conference topic. He was interested and so following an email exchange, I was ready to do an interview for Melbourne at 6.15am, which was 4.15pm my time, the previous day.
This was to be held in the office of the director of PR of ICAO, Denis Chagnon, a bright and bubbly fellow. While we were waiting for the interview to commence, Denis asked me about a book he had been given as a present, called The Brain that changes itself, by Norman Doidge MD. |
This is one of a number of recent books exploring the capacity of damaged brains to repair themselves by having non-damaged areas "take over" the functioning, as long as there is some mental training exercises performed so as to "strengthen" the brain's functionality.
I suggested to Denis an even more popular book, written by science journalist, Sharon Begley, entitled, "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves".
We looked up the book together on Amazon, and then I did my radio interview.
The next day, Denis presented me with a copy of Doidge's book as a signed gift, and it will be a favourite memento of Montreal.
Let's fast forward to yesterday, when I arrived from Canada to New York City's La Guardia Airport. Against my intuition, I hopped on the bus service into Manhattan, and decided to open Doidge's book for the first time. As luck would have it, I opened it to page 42, of Chapter 2, where the word Powerpoint leapt off the page at me.
Intrigued, I looked at the sentence it was in, then decided to go back and read the chapter so as to make sense of how Powerpoint would be mentioned in a book about damaged brains (perhaps too much Powerpoint?)
Chapter 2 is entitled, "Building herself a better brain", and features the story of Barbara Arrowsmith, whose own brain injury saw her develop schooling programs for children suffering learning disabilities.
The essence of the chapter is that traditional learning principles, comprising much rote learning, memorisation, and repetitive writing probably had a lot going for it. When in the 1960s education became more liberalised and less emphasised mechanical-style learning, things changed, and perhaps not for the better. (The same goes for spelling, with the emphasis not so much on correct spelling but on close enough to get the meaning. Now that we are internet-literate accurate spelling is more important than ever in conducting, say, speedy searches.)
Here's the relevant paragraph, including the Powerpoint reference:
"Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s, educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum because they were too rigid, boring, and "not relevant". But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. (ie, how to present, right?) For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, whch requires memory and a level of auditory brainpower unfamiliar to us now. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without extended notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned amongst us, raised in elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omnipresent Powerpoint presentation - the ultimate compensation for a weak premotor cortex."
OMG!
Those of us who grow tired of the emphasis on Powerpoint at work, school and in conferences "know" there is a better way to present for the purpose of others' learning, and so it is great to keep adding more evidence from a variety of sources that will spell the death of powerpoint. Let Powerpoint live as an average picture and chart displayer (as long as it's not linked to Excel, when the graphs it constructs more obfuscates than explains) like iPhoto, but it's time to stop kidding ourselves: In its current usage, it's actually a drain on good learning.
In my next blog entry, which I'll compose back home, I'll show some of the slides from my talk at ICAO last Wednesday. |
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