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Why PowerPoint should be banned

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Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember in college I was marked off for not putting everything I said in my presentation into the powerpoint verbatim. I knew the professor was being dumb, but I just took the grade and moved on. I wonder how many kids in the class actually took her advice.

That is absolutely absurd, and I'm horrified that that's being taught.

He said he was marked off. If I had to guess, he likely overlooked a requirement.

As sibling posts mention, there could've been a need for explicit slides (maybe in lieu of a write-up).

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#162
post #38

Even if you did ban PowerPoint, people would just find a way to do PP-like things with something else. For example, MS Word, with the page down key (although then the transition animations go away, so that is a minor victory). In my opinion, people are just poorly educated (or not educated) in presentation making. Or to phase it another way, a school may teach them to use PP the software but doesn't teach them how to…

At a few dev meetups, some presenters just did markdown documents with enough new lines to be equivalent to a page. That way they just pressed pgdn on their laptop. On another note, some lecture-style slides (where review post-presentation or without presentation) can be really helpful for understanding concepts otherwise described in math and without examples in official papers. Many CS publications seem to make thi…

SliTeX

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so that you can send the slide deck out and people have the actual presentation when they see the slides. I hate when I go somewhere and they provided just the slides of a previous talk and the slides have no real information on them, there is no context or explanation as to what the bulleted points are talking about. Not to say that the talk verbatim in the presentation is a good idea either, but people seem to…

If you were to use something like Presentious ( https://presentio.us/ ) to give your talk, you can capture all of the information presented without reading from your slides. And at the end of your talk, everything can be shared with your audience. For example: https://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs

Thanks for sharing Presentious. It sounds trivial, but producing lightweight presentations synced with audio is quite hard. I like how you can go ahead on audio or slides and then sync them back together.

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#165
I haven't seen anyone mention it here, so a little off topic, but if you have to make lots of presentations with slides Emacs's org mode pdf export [1] (via LaTeX beamer) is a godsend. Easily the fastest way to put together slides I've used, and you get pretty good math and source code support.

An example pdf (not great content, but...): http://gray.clhn.org/dl/macros_etc.pdf

edit: and the .org source file, which is probably more relevant: https://github.com/heike/stat590f/blob/master/macros/macros_...

[1]: http://orgmode.org/manual/Beamer-export.html

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#166
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is not what PowerPoint was created for, it is designed to be an accompaniment to a speaker. If a slide deck is placed online for viewing without the speaker, the speaker notes should provide the extra detail, not the slides themselves.

Excel was created to be used as a spreadsheet, yet I am pretty sure it is used as a database far more often.

The #1 use for Excel is actually lists, you know. Ask Joel Spolsky, who used to be the project lead for the Excel team. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how many people read them? Once you wind up having to point to the contract, the relationship is already south bound. Today people are readily writing software in languages with no specification other than the prototypical implementation. When communication was expensive, investment in big documentation was usually sound. Today, I don't need an atlas of Georgia Counties. I've got Wikipedia and the US Census Burea…

You're confusing a bunch of stuff together here. Agile and powerpoint aren't the same thing. And BDUF/waterfall isn't the same thing as writing specs nor is it the same thing as using reports/essays/documentation to drive discussion and design. The problem with PowerPoint is that it incentivizes laziness and promotes pitch-culture to the detriment of quality in-depth discussion. As I wrote in another post, how I woul…

Agile and powerpoint aren't the same thing.

I guess we'll just have to agree to agree.

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#168

Even if you did ban PowerPoint, people would just find a way to do PP-like things with something else. For example, MS Word, with the page down key (although then the transition animations go away, so that is a minor victory). In my opinion, people are just poorly educated (or not educated) in presentation making. Or to phase it another way, a school may teach them to use PP the software but doesn't teach them how to…

I remember in college I was marked off for not putting everything I said in my presentation into the powerpoint verbatim. I knew the professor was being dumb, but I just took the grade and moved on. I wonder how many kids in the class actually took her advice.

I think one of the most corrosive lessons learnt from schooling is that accomplishment & success is based on following certain rigidly established guidelines created by some shadowy cabal of forces for essentially arbitrary reasons. You are judged by how well you conform to those standards and anything that does or does not happen as a result of your actions is out of your hands.

It's an incredibly efficient way to scale your education system to the masses but it's producing broken people at the end of it who end up believing math is just about following the correct steps, history is about memorizing facts and english is about putting enough words on the page to hit a word count.

Instead, we should be training students to take an outcome focused approach. Define what is the ultimate goal they want to accomplish, establish how to measure their impact towards the goal and suggest previously established strategies that have historically helped but then only evaluate them on whether they successfully achieved their outcome.

Sports is actually a great example of this system working in practice. Your goal is extremely clear, there's clear feedback on your performance and tactics are widely available to learn. Nobody will penalize you in sports if you choose to kick with your left foot when "everyone knows" only right footed kickers succeed in life.

More education should be structured around such a philosophy.

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#170

Even if you did ban PowerPoint, people would just find a way to do PP-like things with something else. For example, MS Word, with the page down key (although then the transition animations go away, so that is a minor victory). In my opinion, people are just poorly educated (or not educated) in presentation making. Or to phase it another way, a school may teach them to use PP the software but doesn't teach them how to…

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