What else is new?

[alexpgp]

An article at ars technica refers to a study published in an academic journal suggesting that animations in PowerPoint presentations actually hinder audience comprehension.

And that applies what one might consider to be the most benign animation, the so-called "builder," in which some number of points related to a topic can be made to appear on a slide one at a time, one below the other, allowing the presenter to comment on each point before going on to the next. (That it applies to presentations where the originator took, as a design requirement, the need to use at least four different animation effects per slide should not even be open to discussion. :^)

It also reminded me of a horrendous job from some time ago, involving PowerPoint, where you couldn't actually see most of the presentation unless you ran the bloody thing, because a hefty percentage of slides relied on animations that built several slides worth of information into a heap on one slide that sort of made sense when viewed in presentation mode (the same result could have been achieved by breaking each such slide into the requisite number of "ordinary" slides), but which was untranslatable without a huge amount of dismantlement and reassembly.

But what am I going on about? I just completed my first pass through a job that will linger in my memory for some time, associated with a word that starts with the letter "s" (and that word ain't "shiny," let me tell you).

PowerPoint is evil.

Cheers...

Comments

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

The gimmicks are bad enough, but the really sad thing is that the whole idea of a presentation is being ever more often allowed to rot by the roadside.

In organizations such as NASA, this kind of approach may be understandable: just as the "other teacher" in your example needed enough meat on which to base a grade, most presentations at NASA briefings have to be able to stand on their own legs after the briefing, so that people who weren't there (or - more likely - weren't paying attention because they were answering email on their Blackberrys) can derive some benefit from the report.

I would argue for presentations where slides are made from a public speaking perspective, i.e., for the purpose of delivering information orally, with only essential visual props, where the "meat" (i.e., the underlying information) is set forth, if necessary, in slide notes (View|Notes Page from the menu bar).

Cheers...

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

I also have to comment on the pitiful quality of these power points. Again, yes, they were just sixth graders. But the number of horribly worded sentences was astounding. We got stuff like:

Their was three aftershocks that many people lost died. and broken briges. Liquification* happened to many places.

* it should be spelled and pronounced liquifaction.

Actually, I am totally failing in my attempt to recreate the (all too many) moments. It was obvious that they never even once reread their work to make corrections. Numbers were incorrectly said, ie, 23 million for 23,000. One girl talked about the Loma Prieta earthquake and never once mentioned the urban area of the Bay Area. Oyveh!