Clive: just discovered your blog. Crazy stuff.

A communications trainer I've worked with indicates that despite our beliefs to the contrary, we can only do one cognitive thing at a time - ie read, write, listen or think. Sounds true - there might even be some research to back that up.

He tells me that presenting Powerpoint slides that repeat the messages given by the presenter/speaker pretty much ensure that no one in the audience will understand what's being presented since they can't keep up with the multiple messaging going on. Not only can't they keep up, they also won't buy whatever you're selling.

99% of PP presentations I've seen use PP redundantly (in this way, like I said, above)

However, I mentioned this at an opening keynote recently and the result was that half of the following workshop presenters cancelled their PP presentations and simply spoke to their audiences. We got more positive feedback from that series of workshops than we've had before.

I find the irony that PP actually inhibits successful presentations to be a truly beautiful thing.

Matt

Matt! Glad you found the place. Pull up a chair!

That rocks so hard about you guys cutting out the PP in the presentation. We should spearhead a "No PowerPoint Day" for Corporate North America. One day in which everyone has to turn off PP and just, well, talk about their stuff!

So, you are back to writing for a living Clive. I see that you have wasted no time in schmoozing the Boston papers for gigs! : )

Re PP and education
- I used to use PP for a large class. If I were introducing a series of names and dates, I would put it up there for everyone to see.
- People seem to turn off their critical thinking mode when they see the slides: after all, the letters are 2 feet high -- they must be true!
- I always made sure to intereact with the presentation. Frex, I used to stand on the stage and move around or gesture at projected images.
- Plus, you should not emerge people in quiet darkness and have them meditate on a screen for an hour. It kills any chance for a decent Q and A session.

I tried to limit the PP sessions to 20 min.

But I never had to use detailed charts or statistics, so it was fine for me.

I adore Edward Tufte and I bought a copy of 'The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint,' but on reading it, I thought that he was somewhat unfair. Just because stupid people use PowerPoint in stupid ways, it doesn't mean that you can conclude that it's the fault of the program. Tufte has always championed the entwinement of content and form but it's almost like he's forgotten that they are two different things. For example (and there are many), nothing stops you from using PowerPoint to present graphics with literally hundreds of data elements (a lot more than the average graphic in the NYT). I've done it, and believe me, it's a lot easier to indicate a specific point on a graph on the screen than it is to say, 'Well, if you turn to page n of your handout and look at the point at position (x,y), it's because...,' which is what Tufte suggests as an alternative. It may be possible to blame PowerPoint for changes in cognition (just as it may be possible to blame Word for changes in writing style), but ultimately, presenters are responsible for their own bad talks just as authors are responsible for their own bad writing. Just because you own a copy of Word, it doesn't mean you can write effectively. Why should PowerPoint be any different when it comes to giving presentations?

hey clive. interesting piece about powerpoint. but does that 40 words per slide (wps) take font-size into account? i've seen people effectively use far more than 40wps (mind you, this was in a context other than a business presentation). in my case, i seem to be more attentive during well-used pp presentations than when pp is not used. but, then again, the term "well-used" is the operative one here. if it is a medium that's abused, your point (and Tufte's) would certainly apply. for instance, it can often be used as the easy way out for people who don't know how to put together an interactive presentation. keep up the good work on collision detection!

I actually use PP in a different way that seems to be pretty successful. Though I also don't like powerpoint, it is because the layout tools are terrible. If you create detailed slides in another program (such as Photoshop), you can get sophistocated images on the screen. I am also approaching this from a slightly different point of view, as I am a architect. I pretty much put pictures of buildings and plans up on the wall and then talk about specific points in the design, which is very different from bullet point presentations.

Looking back over this, I think it is possible to work around PP's limitations to create a decent presentation, but it is not the mark of good tool that you have to struggle against its features to use it effectively.

Speaking to debcha's comment about separating content and form -
"Tufte has always championed the entwinement of content and form but it's almost like he's forgotten that they are two different things."

I tend to hold with Marshall McLuhan's tenet that the medium -is- the message. I know that certainly holds true with me at least in regards to Powerpoint. When I am called into a meeting in which Powerpoint is being used as the delivery medium, the message is inevitably corporate bafflegab - regardless of what is actually on any individual slide.

Sorry to be joining this cool conversation so late, but ...

... yeah, I see your point, Debbie. It's certainly *possible* to use PowerPoint to communicate in very smart, brilliant ways that aren't possible using any other tool. But I'm in the McLuhanesque camp with Kirk and John on this one. Every tool has its biases -- the things it can do really well that other tools can't, and the things it sucks at. Smoke signals are superb because they're so low-tech; all you need is some fire, smoky wood, and a blanket, and you can send a message on a clear day for miles. But as an information theorist once told me, "you can't use smoke signals to philosophize." They're only good at quick, short, code-based communications. On the other hand, a book is a terrific technology for philosophizing -- but awfully hard to construct in the desert, so it loses out to smoke signals on that point. (Also, a book cannot broadcast its contents to multiple audiences at once, as smoke signals can.) In each case, the type of content is *partially* -- though not entirely -- determined by the tool used to communicate. PowerPoint's the same way.

Sure, it's *possible* to include big, well-designed charts in PowerPoint. But as Tufte pointed out, in real life, people tend to transmit much tinier amounts of information in PPT than in almost any other form of communication -- because clearly on some level, PPT's biased towards thin communication.

Nice site. thx.

Let's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:

This code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.

That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.

When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.

The Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.

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