Whoop-dee-do. Finals.

I’ve finally managed to get some studying done today and frankly, a very small amount of it was actually looking at course notes and such. Taking a good look at the 471 PowerPoint slides does not do much because they are just crammed with ridiculous amounts of information it’s uninformative. Attempts to summarize the slides were for naught because I can not stand reading all that information.

So what did I end up doing? Reviewed everything on Wikipedia, while taking down notes that I can actually make use of and read without falling asleep. All the information on every single topic that we cover in class is there and it is explained in a much more directed manner than the slides could ever provide, for the most part of course. Things like how to use Ethereal/Wireshark and tcpdump cannot be found there, nor can I look up stuff on network security, but for the most part, I can study for my final just by browsing Wikipedia. That’s ridiculous since I should be able to learn the material from the lectures (which I stopped going to three or so weeks before the end of the semester, initially because of the amount of other things to do, but eventually because of the uselessness of going because it’ll just be dictation of PowerPoint slides) and notes from the class alone.

I guess me and PowerPoints don’t mix well. Well, rather, poorly made PowerPoint slides. Here’s my heuristics on evaluating effectiveness of PowerPoint slides:

• Does each slide look like it has way too much text? As in, there is so much information on it such that it overwhelms the reader.
• Does each point consist of multiple sentences instead of one single point?
• Does it take too long to read a slide?
• Does it not make you want to read it?
• Does it make you lost when you go off-topic?
• Is information all over the place?
• Is it not precise and to the point?

If “yes” is a response for any of the above questions, it has failed my own personal heuristics for a PowerPoint presentation.

Frankly, only a very small subset of professors that I have had at SFU who used PowerPoints use them effectively. They are meant to provide points of engagement for the presenter to initiate discussion on a certain topic. They should be used to make the listener think, recall, and easily link things together. They should not be used to be the main basis of the entire presentation.

Why do I say that? It’s very simple. For most, something they can see, like words on a wall, catch the eye of the audience more than the words coming out of the speaker. By throwing a bunch of text at the wall, the listeners would try to read all that information instead of the more important part, which is listening to the speaker. Therefore, it makes the entire lecture pointless since it’s all on these slides.

However, when the slides themselves are just stuffed full of information that one cannot make good use of them, it gets silly.

So what makes a good PowerPoint presentation? I try to go by the following:

• Tools >> Custom Animation.. >> Add Effect on text area >> Make it so that points show up one by one. Showing your points one-by-one allows the audience to understand you so much better since they just see a point, take note of it, realize what you are trying to communicate to them about, and then listen.
• Points should be short and to the point. They shouldn’t be completely convoluted. Multiple sentences in one point should not even be seen simply because that’s not even short at all!
• Be dynamic when presenting. Don’t just go idly because that’ll just get people to sleep.

Just to illustrate my point, compare the above set of points with the ones below:

• Make points show up one-by-one
• Do this by adding a custom animation effect on the text area of a slide
• Allows audience to be more receptive to what you say
• Each point should be short and to the point
• No massive blobs of text
• More than one sentence in a point = bad
• Dynamic presentation
• Failure to do so leads to nappers

See the difference proper point placement can make?

I wish they would force people who decide to abuse PowerPoint slides to teach their material to go through a class on doing proper slides before they are allowed to even use it. I’m pretty sure students would be thankful.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Rants, School, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.