Here is a perfect example: John Carmack does a great job of rocking the white-board in this wonderful presentation. He starts out with a tablet, and uses that to track his discussion points, then hits a deep-dive on the white-board at approximately 00:18:45.
I find this style absolutely engaging. Presentation software like PowerPoint has its place, but can make it all-too-easy to move through material too quickly. On the other hand, actually drawing and writing things out while discussing the topic slows things down a bit, allowing the audience to engage and understand the topic at a more learning-friendly pace. I personally find this "show me don't tell me" style of white-board presentation refreshing and conducive to my understanding of the topic.
Agreed, a thousand times over. I lived through the transition from chalkboard + transparency classrooms (high school) to whiteboard classrooms (college) to powerpoint classrooms (grad school). I've also taught with all three.
The real shock for me came later in grad school, when the undergrads (these were all upperclassmen) all basically expected that you'd provide them with the printouts of your slides, and therefore did nothing in class. They'd sit there, diddle on their laptops or phones, and then get cranky and exasperated when you'd tell them, "no, sorry...there are no slides. you have to take notes."
Learning is simply better when you have to write things down. You're engaging your eyes, your ears and your brain...and you're well aware when you're goofing off. I wish colleges would ban powerpoint in the classroom, but since powerpoint is an epic crutch for the lecturer as well, I have my doubts that it will ever happen....
> Learning is simply better when you have to write things down.
I disagree. Learning is better when you aren't able to diddle on your laptop or phone, and having to write things down strongly encourages you not to do those things, but the actual act of writing things down forces you to focus on quickly copying text, which hugely impairs your ability to internalize what was said.
Some people's learning styles might make that less of a problem (i.e. so-called auditory learners might be able to internalize what's being said nearly at the speed it's spoken), but for those of us who need to translate what we hear into our own mental language, constant note-taking substantially hampers the learning process.
The ideal for me is to preview the notes of a lecture before it's given a la Khan Academy, pay full attention during the lecture, occasionally jot down a keyword to trigger the memory of a thought I had during the lecture, and if I didn't have the opportunity to preview the lecture notes then I'll want to be able to access them afterwards to look up anything I don't remember.
Edit: Corrective upvote because you didn't say anything that harms the discussion.
> Learning is simply better when you have to write things down.
If the pace and level of a lecture is such that you can both listen and write things down, then yes, I'd agree that having the extra check is helpful. When you re-create an argument or diagram on paper you force yourself to work out the wrinkles and pay attention to the details in a way that you never do if you're just staring at a slide. However, not all lectures work that way unless you consistently take classes below your level. Sometimes you get hung up on a concept and you're forced to do two things at once:
1) copy the text & diagrams verbatim
2) understand the material
where #1 is significantly more cognitively demanding than reproducing an argument that you already understand (unless you have photographic memory, you look back and forth and back and forth) to the point that it inhibits #2, which creates a further need for #1 in a spiral of uninterrupted misery and needless failure.
This is where premade notes shine. They don't have to be a .ppt (I'd prefer if they were TeX sheets or a book chapter, assuming the book chapter actually corresponds to the same material) but they have to be there if you want students to be able to occasionally focus 100% on what you're saying.
Looking back on my LiveScribe archive, I notice a paradoxical trend: I took significantly better notes in classes that had support from solid permanent materials. Why? Because I was able to stop taking notes, focus, and fill things in later when appropriate as opposed to trying and failing to do #1 and #2 at the same time.
Slightly off topic, but when I was in college a few years ago nobody ever expected slides unless the teacher actually used PowerPoint slides.
If a teacher gave boring PowerPoint presentations and then refused to provide them to their students, that did hugely impact the way students viewed them and the class. It feels like resources are being withheld and amplifies the feeling that the class is just jumping through hoops, a game to be gamified, not something to be taken seriously. Sort of like extremely restrictive DRM on music or games--it just feels disrespectful.
Do you want them to listen to you or be frantically writing? It is A LOT easier to annotate a PDF while pondering the concepts. Too many lectures are like a firehose...
>Learning is simply better when you have to write things down.
Definitely true for me. As an undergraduate, I found the following method to be most successful. I attended every class, transcribed the lecture in my own words as it was taught, and pre-read (once) the next lectures textbook stuff. When exam time came, I only had to review my notes the night before the eXam.
Come to think of it, I still have fairly good recall of the knowledge I gained using that method (many years hence). The memorization stuff, tho, I have to practice on trivia sites to recall.
We're talking about learning, so, of course, ymmv.
I think it depends on the person. I never took notes in college, and doing so would have been distracting and difficult, nevermind that I would have been too lazy to ever look at my notes regardless.
In my case, it's probably not possible just in terms of the way my brain is wired to listen-comprehend and write at the same time (this isn't an exaggeration. As a separate example, I can't speak/listen at all while I'm playing videogames).
I suck at auditory stuff in general, and if I have to take notes on something, I can't process any of what's being said and must basically try to frantically transcribe what's being said. The idea of expecting everyone to take notes has never made sense to me. Are they there to learn your subject or practice transcription skills?
I am taking a course now after 15+years out of college and I see it differently.
The best thing is having the slides before the lesson in pdf and keeping notes on a tablet.
I take freeform notes on the slides with a pen and then I rewrite them at home in text boxes on the slides. Notes are searchable at home (Linux) and at work (windows) with DocFetcher, and the tablet sync happens with btsync.
Everything is automated, I can watch the presentation and keep complete and meaningful notes.
The professor is very good and he keeps mentioning details and intuitions that I would not have time absorb or note if I spent all my time rewriting math equations that are all over the internet.
This is for a math heavy course but I think it applies to most type of courses.
I think part of this is that students are conditioned to ignore lecture because of the sheer amount of bad lectures they've had. I've had quite a few terrible lecturers where the professor had no clue how to teach, and was simply reading off the book or using the publisher-supplied slides that came with the book (which are often terrible).
When this happens often enough, students internalize that lecture is a waste of time and they can learn better themselves. Some won't even show up, others will show up purely to get attendance credit but do something else.
For people to listen, lecture needs to provide something that simply reading a book doesn't.
For me, I found the best was when I had the notes printed out before class. I would annotate them with extra thoughts as I watched the lecture. This kept me engaged, but not so busy writing that I couldn't actually think about the lecture.
learning by doing reminds me of Jaron Lanier experiments in embedding people into 'animals' [1]. I believe your brain is eager to swallow analog and massive data, and actually doing things will be much more mechanically sympathetic and fruitful. Maybe that's why scanning a book by running pages under your thumb leaves a better trail in my brain than having symbolic bookmarks on an e-reader (for small numbers obviously)
[1] don't know how, maybe a suit with VR goggles in a game with tweaked physics and different limb constraints, anything to throw your habits off.
I like the numberphile series on youtube. I showed one in class where he explains how some infinities are bigger than others. My non-math-inclined students were able to follow it by watching several times, because they could see the entire process. They re-created the process themselves, rather than just trying to digest an explanation of an already-completed proof/ demonstration.
I love Numberphile too and recently stumbled on Computerphile. The style is the same for both shows -- a passionate person explaining something reasonably complex. For instance, I like Computerphile's video on the evolution of character encoding and why UTF was developed.
It seems to me that your example has nothing to do with PowerPoint and everything to do with the fact that it's John. Effing. Carmack. giving the presentation. I'm sure he could give a great presentation using only PowerPoint, and I'm sure there are thousands of people who couldn't give an enjoyable presentation with any technology or medium.
Phew. Finally the reign of powerpoint begins to fade.
If non-technical speakers spent less time faffing around before the session making awful looking powerpoints, and more time learning how to speak engagingly, the world would be a much better place.
This said as an Audio/Visual Operator who has spent hundreds of hours at a sound-desk watching technically inept speakers fail to impress - no matter how flashy the animations.
The worse thing over the last few years is 'Prezi'. It's a powerpoint alternative which ostensibly makes it easier to make awesome looking graphics.
The 2 problems with it are that it's a hell of a lot harder to actually present on a second screen, so you end up having to drag windows around, and that speakers are still under the impression that because you have swooshes and zooms and text folding inside other text, suddenly it's more likely for people to find the presentation content interesting.
The trouble with BAD technology, is how do you fight it? The normal way is by competition - making better tech. But when the concept itself is wrong, but somehow culturely accepted...? Any ideas?
One of the biggest problems with PowerPoint presentations is their linearity (i.e. one-dimensional). Most topics, stories, etc. are not linear.
We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations.
A good start that I've tried was to make a 10-foot-by-10-foot drawing on GoogleDocs, and then arrange all my content within that one slide. Since it's a two-dimensional canvas, there's plenty of opportunities for putting related topics close to each other, even if you talk about them at separate times. It's also effective to put loops in your procession, so that you return to a topic that you covered earlier, reiterating its significance and reminding the audience of it. (Another advantage is that you can save it as a PDF. Then open it in a program, such as Chrome, which lets you zoom in as far as you want. You'll never have to worry about text being too small to read again!)
Well, you can actually build non-linear presentations in powerpoint.
I'm a high school teacher, and I had a rule for a while whenever students wanted to make powerpoint presentations. They had to build on-screen navigation into their presentation, just as if they were building a website. When they were giving their presentation, they had to use the on-screen navigation, instead of clicking forward and back. The navigation had to be semantic, it couldn't be just "next" and "previous".
Presentations were interesting, because people were free to interrupt with questions such as, "Your data seemed to show xyz, can you explain how your conclusion of abc really follows from your data?" Then students could click right over to the data part of their presentation, without flipping through all the slides in between.
Like most things, the problem is how a tool is used, not the tool itself.
It's funny, but overhead projectors were great for that. You could easily throw random foils on it as needed. You could draw on foils in real time with a marker. Hell, you could throw on a blank foil and draw on that if you wanted. We need a modern replacement for the overhead, and PowerPoint ain't it.
If you have PowerPoint 2007, try to find an experimental plugin call pptplex. It allows you to create a presentation almost identical to the style you described, with an almost infinite zoom feature. It came out of the Microsoft research labs, where there mixed the technology behind Seadragon (now deep zoom - theres a great talk on TED with one of the creators of Seadragon)
Anything that occurs in the real world occurs linearly. Time is linear. If you are going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2, and B.1 before point B.2, but you will speak about point B.1 before point A.2, then just put them in that order:
I'm a teacher, we have those in all our classrooms. You can prepare some sparse screens in advance, literally just starter points or sentences/images. Then annotate as audience throw up ideas. IW software allows export to pdf so email/upload during talk.
My startup is looking into interactive whiteboards as a replacement/compliment to regular ones. We'd like the ability to save our whiteboard work to disk, for one. I'm tasked with figuring this out but have no idea what to look for for our use case - size, resolution, integrated WLAN, etc? What do you guys use?
The problem is that some tools give people a false sense of confidence, making them beleive that if they have a 'good' slide deck, then they won't need to spend much effort preparing for everything else.
Like people with a new 4-wheel drive car, driving in the snow for the first time...
A real programmer can build their slide deck in code. Not that this fixes the problem, but I was greatly inspired when I saw Matthew Flatt present with SlideShow [1] for the first time.
PowerPoint isn't the enemy. Poor use of PowerPoint is the problem. Bad presenters is the problem. People switching over to white boards won't make them better presenters, now they'll be communicating poorly in a messy unshareable medium.
The solution isn't no PowerPoint. The solution is teach people how to communicate. How to present to both technical and nontechnical audience. How to write an executive summary / elevator pitch.
PowerPoint encourages and rewards a particular style of communication (the "pitch") which is unsuitable for most uses. It also actively discourages many more effective forms of communication. As such most of the time using it does degrade the quality of communication and not using it is an easy route to improving the quality of communication.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to use powerpoint well. Hell, it's possible to write world class code in Perl. It's possible to build skyscrapers in a swamp. That doesn't mean you should force yourself to do so. It's always smarter to stack the odds in your favor as much as possible.
People who are being presented to know when they are and aren't absorbing the material being presented. Its rather easy give your opinion on the cases where it doesn't work. It would be far more helpful if you had suggested specific alternatives..
Agreed. Now instead of people reading off of Powerpoint slides, they'll be talking into a whiteboard with their back to you, while you struggle to read their handwriting (and short of taking a picture of the whiteboard afterwards, you won't be able to review the notes).
I prefer Powerpoint over white/blackboard because:
1. People make mistakes on the whiteboard
2. You can't save it and review later
3. Even if you write everything down, it would still be less
information than what someone could add in the Powerpoint
4. Powerpoint is much more legible
5. It is easier to go at your own pace during and after the presentation if someone is using a Powerpoint. If someone is using a white/blackboard they are going to erase the last part very quickly after they finished writing it down.
Most universities I've been to have 9 black/white-boards in a lecture hall. No risk of erasing what was just written because you run out of space.
In case you haven't seen this configuration, the boards are mounted on rails that allow them to slide up above each other when you're done with one, with three of these set ups next to each other giving you a 3x3 grid of blackboards. Smaller lecture rooms have a 2x2 grid which lasts quite long also.
I've heard that writing equations on a whiteboard paces the talk and give the audience time to digest. With a slideshow most presenters will go at a pace comfortable for them, but that typically ends up being too fast for the audience.
I don't understand this. Most of my teachers use blackboards and it's really annoying to follow a presentation like that, you have to wait for the person to write, you have no slides later on to support your notes, and since you have no slides online you have to write everything they write, so you can't even listen properly to the talk.
And some stuff are just clearer on slides... I don't really see a lot of benefits in whiteboard-only lectures. Combination of whiteboard and slides are best.
I can still think of some great people who don't use slides but it's rare and a few people do it well (Gilbert Strang comes to my mind[1]).
I find that blackboard oriented lectures are much more conducive to audience/lecturer communication because during blackboard oriented lectures going off the rails is seamlessly natural, while that could not be further from the case with powerpoint oriented lectures.
Overhead projector lectures are the best of both worlds. You can make pre-prepared foils but modify them on the fly, and create new ones on the fly as naturally as you can write on a blackboard.
You don't need slides to support your notes.
There are two kind of classes: those that bring you up to speed; all the stuff there is found in textbooks or review papers.
And those that present wholly new ideas (research seminars, conferences,) where you can just read the paper or the preprint for details.
The only time I've seen something on the board that I really had to copy down to keep an copy of was exercises and their solutions.
if your teacher has a textbook that he follows okay, but here in France most teachers don't and you have to copy everything they write. And even if they have a course online, they will waste so much time just writing it...
Readit News
I find this style absolutely engaging. Presentation software like PowerPoint has its place, but can make it all-too-easy to move through material too quickly. On the other hand, actually drawing and writing things out while discussing the topic slows things down a bit, allowing the audience to engage and understand the topic at a more learning-friendly pace. I personally find this "show me don't tell me" style of white-board presentation refreshing and conducive to my understanding of the topic.
The Physics of Light and Rendering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw
The real shock for me came later in grad school, when the undergrads (these were all upperclassmen) all basically expected that you'd provide them with the printouts of your slides, and therefore did nothing in class. They'd sit there, diddle on their laptops or phones, and then get cranky and exasperated when you'd tell them, "no, sorry...there are no slides. you have to take notes."
Learning is simply better when you have to write things down. You're engaging your eyes, your ears and your brain...and you're well aware when you're goofing off. I wish colleges would ban powerpoint in the classroom, but since powerpoint is an epic crutch for the lecturer as well, I have my doubts that it will ever happen....
I disagree. Learning is better when you aren't able to diddle on your laptop or phone, and having to write things down strongly encourages you not to do those things, but the actual act of writing things down forces you to focus on quickly copying text, which hugely impairs your ability to internalize what was said.
Some people's learning styles might make that less of a problem (i.e. so-called auditory learners might be able to internalize what's being said nearly at the speed it's spoken), but for those of us who need to translate what we hear into our own mental language, constant note-taking substantially hampers the learning process.
The ideal for me is to preview the notes of a lecture before it's given a la Khan Academy, pay full attention during the lecture, occasionally jot down a keyword to trigger the memory of a thought I had during the lecture, and if I didn't have the opportunity to preview the lecture notes then I'll want to be able to access them afterwards to look up anything I don't remember.
Edit: Corrective upvote because you didn't say anything that harms the discussion.
If the pace and level of a lecture is such that you can both listen and write things down, then yes, I'd agree that having the extra check is helpful. When you re-create an argument or diagram on paper you force yourself to work out the wrinkles and pay attention to the details in a way that you never do if you're just staring at a slide. However, not all lectures work that way unless you consistently take classes below your level. Sometimes you get hung up on a concept and you're forced to do two things at once:
1) copy the text & diagrams verbatim
2) understand the material
where #1 is significantly more cognitively demanding than reproducing an argument that you already understand (unless you have photographic memory, you look back and forth and back and forth) to the point that it inhibits #2, which creates a further need for #1 in a spiral of uninterrupted misery and needless failure.
This is where premade notes shine. They don't have to be a .ppt (I'd prefer if they were TeX sheets or a book chapter, assuming the book chapter actually corresponds to the same material) but they have to be there if you want students to be able to occasionally focus 100% on what you're saying.
Looking back on my LiveScribe archive, I notice a paradoxical trend: I took significantly better notes in classes that had support from solid permanent materials. Why? Because I was able to stop taking notes, focus, and fill things in later when appropriate as opposed to trying and failing to do #1 and #2 at the same time.
If a teacher gave boring PowerPoint presentations and then refused to provide them to their students, that did hugely impact the way students viewed them and the class. It feels like resources are being withheld and amplifies the feeling that the class is just jumping through hoops, a game to be gamified, not something to be taken seriously. Sort of like extremely restrictive DRM on music or games--it just feels disrespectful.
Definitely true for me. As an undergraduate, I found the following method to be most successful. I attended every class, transcribed the lecture in my own words as it was taught, and pre-read (once) the next lectures textbook stuff. When exam time came, I only had to review my notes the night before the eXam.
Come to think of it, I still have fairly good recall of the knowledge I gained using that method (many years hence). The memorization stuff, tho, I have to practice on trivia sites to recall.
We're talking about learning, so, of course, ymmv.
In my case, it's probably not possible just in terms of the way my brain is wired to listen-comprehend and write at the same time (this isn't an exaggeration. As a separate example, I can't speak/listen at all while I'm playing videogames).
The best thing is having the slides before the lesson in pdf and keeping notes on a tablet. I take freeform notes on the slides with a pen and then I rewrite them at home in text boxes on the slides. Notes are searchable at home (Linux) and at work (windows) with DocFetcher, and the tablet sync happens with btsync.
Everything is automated, I can watch the presentation and keep complete and meaningful notes. The professor is very good and he keeps mentioning details and intuitions that I would not have time absorb or note if I spent all my time rewriting math equations that are all over the internet. This is for a math heavy course but I think it applies to most type of courses.
When this happens often enough, students internalize that lecture is a waste of time and they can learn better themselves. Some won't even show up, others will show up purely to get attendance credit but do something else.
For people to listen, lecture needs to provide something that simply reading a book doesn't.
[1] don't know how, maybe a suit with VR goggles in a game with tweaked physics and different limb constraints, anything to throw your habits off.
Infinity is bigger than you think
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elvOZm0d4H0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4
If non-technical speakers spent less time faffing around before the session making awful looking powerpoints, and more time learning how to speak engagingly, the world would be a much better place.
This said as an Audio/Visual Operator who has spent hundreds of hours at a sound-desk watching technically inept speakers fail to impress - no matter how flashy the animations.
The worse thing over the last few years is 'Prezi'. It's a powerpoint alternative which ostensibly makes it easier to make awesome looking graphics.
The 2 problems with it are that it's a hell of a lot harder to actually present on a second screen, so you end up having to drag windows around, and that speakers are still under the impression that because you have swooshes and zooms and text folding inside other text, suddenly it's more likely for people to find the presentation content interesting.
The trouble with BAD technology, is how do you fight it? The normal way is by competition - making better tech. But when the concept itself is wrong, but somehow culturely accepted...? Any ideas?
We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations.
A good start that I've tried was to make a 10-foot-by-10-foot drawing on GoogleDocs, and then arrange all my content within that one slide. Since it's a two-dimensional canvas, there's plenty of opportunities for putting related topics close to each other, even if you talk about them at separate times. It's also effective to put loops in your procession, so that you return to a topic that you covered earlier, reiterating its significance and reminding the audience of it. (Another advantage is that you can save it as a PDF. Then open it in a program, such as Chrome, which lets you zoom in as far as you want. You'll never have to worry about text being too small to read again!)
I'm a high school teacher, and I had a rule for a while whenever students wanted to make powerpoint presentations. They had to build on-screen navigation into their presentation, just as if they were building a website. When they were giving their presentation, they had to use the on-screen navigation, instead of clicking forward and back. The navigation had to be semantic, it couldn't be just "next" and "previous".
Presentations were interesting, because people were free to interrupt with questions such as, "Your data seemed to show xyz, can you explain how your conclusion of abc really follows from your data?" Then students could click right over to the data part of their presentation, without flipping through all the slides in between.
Like most things, the problem is how a tool is used, not the tool itself.
Isn't that what hyperlinks do? Perhaps I don't understand what you mean.
http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/
(I really dislike these presentations)
A.1, B.1, A.2, B.2
Problem solved.
Deleted Comment
I'm a teacher, we have those in all our classrooms. You can prepare some sparse screens in advance, literally just starter points or sentences/images. Then annotate as audience throw up ideas. IW software allows export to pdf so email/upload during talk.
I wouldn't be so sure. Scott McNealy famously "banned" PowerPoint at Sun in 1997 and people said the same thing then.
I know. But here's a guy being hopeful. :-)
[0] http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html - see [1] for context.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pa... - see [2] for an alternative viewpoint.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel
Like people with a new 4-wheel drive car, driving in the snow for the first time...
[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1166020
http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/jfp05-ff.pdf [PDF]
The solution isn't no PowerPoint. The solution is teach people how to communicate. How to present to both technical and nontechnical audience. How to write an executive summary / elevator pitch.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to use powerpoint well. Hell, it's possible to write world class code in Perl. It's possible to build skyscrapers in a swamp. That doesn't mean you should force yourself to do so. It's always smarter to stack the odds in your favor as much as possible.
1. People make mistakes on the whiteboard
2. You can't save it and review later
3. Even if you write everything down, it would still be less information than what someone could add in the Powerpoint
4. Powerpoint is much more legible
5. It is easier to go at your own pace during and after the presentation if someone is using a Powerpoint. If someone is using a white/blackboard they are going to erase the last part very quickly after they finished writing it down.
In case you haven't seen this configuration, the boards are mounted on rails that allow them to slide up above each other when you're done with one, with three of these set ups next to each other giving you a 3x3 grid of blackboards. Smaller lecture rooms have a 2x2 grid which lasts quite long also.
And some stuff are just clearer on slides... I don't really see a lot of benefits in whiteboard-only lectures. Combination of whiteboard and slides are best.
I can still think of some great people who don't use slides but it's rare and a few people do it well (Gilbert Strang comes to my mind[1]).
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c
Overhead projector lectures are the best of both worlds. You can make pre-prepared foils but modify them on the fly, and create new ones on the fly as naturally as you can write on a blackboard.
And those that present wholly new ideas (research seminars, conferences,) where you can just read the paper or the preprint for details.
The only time I've seen something on the board that I really had to copy down to keep an copy of was exercises and their solutions.