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.
Yes, I absolutely agree with that, and should have said that in my earlier comment. Thanks for bringing that up.
My problem is with the presentations, not with the tool itself.
However, I've never actually seen somebody give a non-linear PowerPoint presentation. TBH, I don't think very many people know how to do this. (including me -- but thanks for pointing this out, I will definitely spend some time figuring out how to do it).
This makes me wonder whether the problem with PowerPoint is that it makes it easy for people to be lazy with their presentations.
It's pretty straightforward. Simple approach:
- Make a textbox.
- Add a word for each page you want to link to.
- Highlight the word.
- Insert -> hyperlink -> Place in this document.
- Copy that textbox to every page.
Here's a simple example. I put it on github, because I don't use dropbox, and I haven't heard good things about slideshare.
There were a few things wrong with them (painful to look at while operating, and the bulbs tended to burn out if you moved them around while turned on) but fundamentally I don't think they were broken technology. Overhead projectors would be well complimented by computer projectors, but computer projectors make a poor replacement for them. Attempts to replicate the advantages of overhead projectors on computer projectors always fall flat, as far as I have seen.
I think the demise of overhead projectors is an example of a regression caused by our tendency to have rose-tinted glasses whenever considering more technological alternatives to existing technology.
The advantage of these over overhead projectors would still be pretty small though (really only the being blinded and replacement bulbs issue), so you would need to ensure that the system is rock-solid reliable. If not, then you've just made it worse by making it more advanced.
Isn't that what hyperlinks do? Perhaps I don't understand what you mean.
What I liked about this approach was that you start out from your main content -- perhaps it's a summary or overview -- then you go off into a sub-topic, and then you come back to the overview so how the sub-topic is related to the whole is constantly being reminded to the viewers.
So yes, that kind of thing is what I'm going for (but I'm no expert -- I would love to hear more ideas!)
http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/
(I really dislike these presentations)
The "vertical slides" add a bit of hierarchy, but again, I don't feel that they add any non-linearity to the presentation.
Now, if say the 15th slide referred back to some content in the 8th, or if the 3rd-6th slides were all interrelated -- and this structure was reflected in the structure of the presentation -- then I would be enthusiastic.
So tl,dr; I agree with you -- I dislike these presentations.
A.1, B.1, A.2, B.2
Problem solved.
What I am saying is that:
- most (all?) topics are not 1-dimensional: they deal with multiple issues with many complicated interrelations and interactions. Let's call them multi-dimensional.
- many people build 1-dimensional presentations using PowerPoint (and related tools).
- treating a multi-dimensional topic as 1-dimensional makes for a poor, confusing presentation.
To connect this with your point: the hard part of building a presentation is mapping an n-dimensional topic onto a 1-dimensional medium (time), while sacrificing the minimum amount of accuracy. Based on personal experience, many people don't spend much time on this part; they just throw a bunch of information onto slides in an arbitrary order. And so this smacks of circular reasoning to me:
> 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. Problem solved.
But how do you know you're going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2? Figuring that out is the hard part!
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All this is just my subjective opinion, of course. :)
We're going to view them in some order, just put them in that order and call it a day. If there is no order, then random order should be just fine. After all, what if you really needed more than two dimensions? You'd have to compress your ideas into a two-dimensional space anyway. Might as well make it one-dimensional and therefore less confusing.
Solution finding in a quantum computer? They're solutions are supposedly parallel and non-linearisable. Reading the solutions I guess forces linearity.
There's also relativistic issues but you can solve those by saying there's an implicit "within any particular Inertial Frame of Reference".
I think perhaps what you mean is anything that we experience we experience linearly; is that a better way of saying it?
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.
If you decide you really do need the IW, then try to find a local school/college that will let you play with theirs for an hour after classes. You will get a good idea of what the software can do, and you can find out about the drawbacks of various makes.
One concrete advantage of an IW might be annotating actual screens. Most IW software automatically grabs screen of driving computer then allows you to write over the static image. All the IW software I have used (smartboard, active edition, the dolphin ones) allow saving of whiteboard stacks as PDFs.
I wouldn't be so sure. Scott McNealy famously "banned" PowerPoint at Sun in 1997 and people said the same thing then.
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?