Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was reading this post on Dangeously Irrelevent . Most of their posts I like, however this one left me with a "WTF?!" grimace. The topic is 5 clever powerpoint tips. Some tips are actually good, like creating a custom slide show and hyperliking to a new presentation. There are two tips that are just not well thought out. The first is to "start creating your presentations in widescreen format" I hadn’t really thought about the fact that most laptops ARE now shipping with wide screens to accommodate widescreen video and movie formats. So why not start creating any new PowerPoint slide decks that you make in widescreen format? Well, yes laptops are in widescreen, but your presentation medium is not! Most projects in classrooms today (including portable ones) are still optimized for a 4:3 aspect ratio. Presentation screens are also 4:3, so why give up on that prime real estate? This makes no sense! Yes in the future these two bottlenecks will be widescreen as well,...

I had a good laugh when I read this over at the PowerPoint Ninja . The author goes though a list of the different types of bad PowerPoint presenter types (although I find that sometimes these types intermix). It's no surprise that I've survived a number of bad PowerPoint presentations. The most annoying ones are the Reader, the Apologist and the Wanderer. This tells me that they've spent NO time actually preparing for their presentations (well all the types tell me that, but the most egregious ones are the ones I mentioned). There are two blog posts on the topic over at the PowerPoint Ninja. Have at 'em, they are entertaining (unless you suffer from PowerPoint Presentation PTSD). For what it's worth, when I teach people PowerPoint I try to teach them more about presentation technique rather than teach them about flashy bulletpoints flying all over the screen.

I saw this over at the PowerPoint ninja a while back and decided that it would be a good resource to post on here for all the PowerPoint n00bs. It's the PowerPoint Design Triangle - similar to any good-ol' project management/competing attention type of paradigm (gah! I used that word again!) Have a look - it's worth at least five minutes of your time :-)

I've been a graduate student now longer than I was an undergraduate. One of the hallmarks of graduate education are presentations, many, many presentations. Granted my first presentations stunk royally, but I've made it my personal goal to be a good presenter by the time I am out of grad school. Blogs like Presentation Zen and classes like Visual Literacy do help, but there is also an element of posture, showmanship, and owning the room that come with practice and feeling confident about yourself - this is the element that many graduate school students are missing. These graduate students use PowerPoint as a crutch to distract themselves from the main issue which is confidence. I came across these older videos of Steve Jobs, a great presenter by any measure, but he isn't using electronic means to get his message out. He is using a whiteboard! These videos are quite interesting (total run time is 18 minutes). Sometimes I think that it would be worthwhile for undergraduate st...