One of my side projects at work is to record training presentations and I try to be so conscious about this–both trying to avoid the word salad slides, and also trying to make my lecture not just reading the slide word-for-word but actually explaining and expanding on the slide content (with my verbal lecture transcribed as a note in the slide and handed out for anybody who might be hard of hearing/doesn’t want to sit through a 30-minute video)
You scheduled 15 min for this presentation and I have another meeting after this. So cliff notes only please.
Just email me the script. I’ll have an LLM summarize it.
At university, I had a lecturer who took this one step further. Instead of a power point, he used a word document that he read word by word.
We had one who pulled up the pdf of the textbook to read it word by word
You sure they weren’t just sharing the wrong screen?
legere (lat) to read => lectura (lat) the reading event => lecture (en) => lecturer (en) a person giving/hosting a reading event.
A lecturer is supposed to read the text of a book to students so that they are able to write it down and obtain a copy of it for themselves.
Books written by professional scribes are incredible expensive, and this new thing they established in Bologna in 1088 – the so called “universities” offering lectures will be a major breakthrough in the history of mankind to distribute knowledge!
Good to know some professors still honour the only true way of teaching.
A lecturer is supposed to read the text of a book to students so that they are able to write it down and obtain a copy of it for themselves.
Does this still happen, with digital and all?
If the lecturer hasn’t got the notice books can be cheaply printed and purchased nowadays, probably yes. What is this digital your speeking of?
Bruder …
books written by professional scribes are incredible expensive
some things haven’t changed …
Pfff this generation is wasting good expensive sheets of paper when good old oral tradition has worked for thousands of years. Writing was invented only 4000 years ago and still haven’t caught on.
it’s a fad, like medicine
Ugh, I always tell students to avoid this.
That said it reminds me of Larry David on Conan podcast of how he got out of a movie test screening. “I’ve got one question and then I’ve gotta go…”.
Ah, treasures, both of them.
I remember back in high school my teachers would always warn students for doing presentations like that, yet all of them did exactly the same thing. And it was even worse in university, when we had to listen to 2 hours presentation read word by word with monotone voice.
Hug the monotone voice is the worst. A colleague of mine does that. If you are making a presentation and you sound bored all the way through, guess how your audience is going to feel?
If you sound too enthusiastic, you might wake people up.
Wakes up
-Wait a minute… you’re full of shit!
Yup! I even tell them to experiment a little because they get full points either way (my logic is, the social pressure alone is enough to get a good effort, and usually that’s true lol).
It’s because they didn’t trust their ability to remember stuff. But when I lecture, I’m often elaborating beyond the bulletpoints, engaging my audience with questions, making eye contact, etc, so it’s not like I’m not setting a good example. I guess my university it’s just too late to teach?
I’m more prone to making the slides be my notes, possibly with data-driven visual aids. 3-5 short bullet points per slide is usually reasonable. I don’t actually give a lot of presentations these days, though.
I take this to the extreme: my slides have little to no text, or even white space. Each slide is basically a collage for pointing at while I rant about the thing. I’m a mechanical engineer, so I also imitate the sounds the machine makes.
My issue with this is that I’d like to be able to distribute the slide deck afterwards for people who can’t attend. I’ve heard people advocate for keeping separate infosheets to accompany the presentation but I can’t be bothered usually.
If my stage performance is unnecessary, then it would be better suited as an email than a presentation. If it is necessary, then they’ll need to watch the video.
I’m not going to create the same message twice in two formats. If they disrespect my time, then I might not be a good fit for their corporate culture.
I hate these kinds of slides because I’ll come across them somewhere and be like “WHAT THE FUCK IS THE CONTEXT FOR THESE NUMBERS??? WHAT DOES THIS HALF-ASS DIAGRAM REPRESENT?” and the information I extract becomes less usable as a result.
I often won’t read PowerPoints in that style unless a recording of the presentation is available, otherwise I just pretend it doesn’t exist and get my information elsewhere because certainty ain’t optional mf.
I think if you’ve chosen your bullet points well then the point should come across through them, but if you’re looking for a higher level of detail then the slide deck is probably not gonna get you there regardless. It’s standard practice to record this type of presentation, but if you’re really wanting a deep dive, you probably want to see the supporting documents, not just an executive summary. I guess it depends on what kind of presentation we’re talking about, too, because a presentation to push info up to management is pretty different from the type someone might give at a conference.
Lets hope they forgot to run spellcheck
I hate this. It’s basically just a lecture with slides as the cue cards, which the audience can read for themselves.
It’s like having subtitles in real life.
Ugh. Give me some data, graphs, or pictures of cats to look at for the slideshow or something. Something other than what you’re saying. If you add nothing to what we’re seeing, then… I have eyes. I don’t need you to read it for me.
PowerPoint, at least, has a notes section and a presenter view, so you can hook your computer up with the projector or TV or whatever as a second monitor and PowerPoint can be set up to use the TV/projector/whatever, as the slide show, and give you a presenter view on your screen which shows the current slide, and all your notes.
So if you can’t get relevant pictures, at least put up something interesting to look at, and leave the cue cards notes in the notes section, so the audience doesn’t have to stare at the exact words you’re saying, as you’re saying them, because I guarantee you that if you do, I’ll be judging you on your spelling and grammar.
It’s pretty bad practice to just read what’s on the slide. Presentations would be prepared in such a way, and known to a degree where the slides act as refreshers for the presenter with something visual to give context. There are specific cases where you can’t get away from it, but those are incredibly specific and not very common. Like, safety meetings with specific things that need to be read verbatim to every employee, and even those still need something to break it up. I can’t think of another example.
I do like subtites almost everywhere, but hate these slides.
Maybe I also want adjustable playback speed, fast forward and readable high contrast subtites in my real live playback.
So if you can’t get relevant pictures, at least put up something interesting to look at
Got it. Filling my PowerPoint Deck with porn, and pictures of Battlemechs
Yes. A good slide show contains a lot of visually pleasing elements that are easy to read and understand but they still hold a lot of information. Like graphs or statistics or just bulletin points with some keywords or single short paragraohs that tell how it is in a nutshell. Then the one who makes the presentation should tell the rest
A good way would be to write an essay with all the information you need. Then you would strip just the most important main elements and add those to the slide show.
That way I got the best grade from one course even though I submitted it late and lacked a lot of other tasks in the course. The teacher was actually impressed by how much information I packed in so simple powerpoint. I also had like 20 sources, did it all in on afternoon the day before deadline lol. Adhd is interesting. You procastinate something for weeks and then do multiple days work in one crunch. Medication would be neat but I live in a country where you can’t get medication even if you smoke weed.
Anyways. I don’t know why I wrote all this. I should be programming
Damn. Are you me? I’m not a programmer so I guess not.
I was hounded by one of my HS teachers to put in a little more effort, constantly.
I got annoyed by this and basically rage-wrote an essay that was due in the span of a few hours the night before it was due. Despite my lack of sources (I couldn’t be bothered to look up the information), I still got an A on the paper. She stopped telling me to try harder. IDK if that’s because she realized I didn’t do poorly because I couldn’t understand, because I clearly did, or she was just satisfied that she got me to do something and didn’t bother pestering me about it, but regardless, I felt like I won.
I never did that well on anything else in her class. I just couldn’t be bothered.
20+ years later, it turns out I have ADHD. So yeah. That explains a lot.
School before realizing I have concentration problems was mysterious time. I juat didn’t feel like doing stuff and I didn’t know why.
Also yeah your teacher propably just thought that you would need extra work to understand the course. I had a teacher who actually told me that when he first started teaching me he thought I’m a bit dumb, a below average student. But then he came to realize that I’m actually really smart but I just don’t do anything. It felt weird because at the same time I wad proud that a teacher actually said to me that I am smart. But at the same time I started wondering that why I indeed didn’t do anything.
I’m going to finally get my meds though, I just have to piss in a jar to prove I’m not smoking weed for like half a year lol. But I have gotten to the point where I don’t feel like it’s going to be an issue. I’m about to turn 24, weed used to be my coping mechanism to a lot of stuff but I have matured now and I feel like a long break would just do really good. Also I want those meds cuz my school isn’t going that well and I want to graduate and get a job already :D the courses aren’t hard but I usually lose the motivation one montv in and after that trying to finish the course is insanely hard
I was diagnosed a few years ago. I was 39. I’ve been on meds since.
My HS experience was fairly typical for an ADHD kid before ADHD was a thing… I was called lazy, I was told I needed to apply myself (whatever that means), etc. I believed it. I just thought I was a lazy ass little shit. I didn’t know why, but the evidence was clear. I understood the information, I just didn’t do any of the work.
Oh well. Live and learn. I eventually made it through college, and into a career, all without meds. It was a painful struggle, especially when dealing with the more monotonous tasks associated with having a job… I was chronically late, I slept in a lot… I was just all over the place.
Now, with the meds, I still have my hair share of bad days, but when I’m faced with the horrendous burden of monotonous tasks, instead of having to force myself to do it, I usually have more of an attitude of “whelp, I better get this done so I can move on”. It’s no longer an impossible task to simply get myself started on something that’s not very stimulating.
It’s nice.
That does sound reallu peaceful compared to this. I bet it was even harder at you time of youth when people didn’t understand the condition.
It’s honestly really super weird nobody noticed that I might be a bit odd. Like I had alll the signs now that I recall. Even some stuff related to asperger. But I just went straight trough the filters
Death by a hundred slides.
This is the waterpark I want to go to this summer.
death by a hundred slides water park you say?
I’ll never forget the one professor who put up a side of code… And had no idea what the class was about. We spent most of the class reading together with him to try to figure out what the lesson was supposed to be about
Apparently the guy was one of those crazy low-level guys who can do things I don’t understand but build on top of. Guy just constantly looked bewildered by reality, he belonged in the code world
So what was the lesson supposed to be about?
“sometimes it’s okay to skip class”
Semaphores. It was obviously C++ code with a bunch of threads, but as it was a standalone C++ program it wasn’t really clear why it was lol
Oh no, synchronization primitives!
Well, you can end up implementing synchronization primitive if you are writing game. Sometimes game engine is kernel in userspace.
By low level guys, you mean he knew about circuits and EE? But he got stuck teaching a C++ class but he couldn’t code?
By low level, I mean like kernel work. I’m told he worked on one of the 'nixes way back when.
It was a data structures class, we did Java or Python in the into classes, php & js for Web + db basics and C++ for theory classes. Then you pick your path
Anyways, the guy taught OS, language design, and data structures. He could code fine, he was just a terrible lecturer - extremely disorganized, no lesson plans. He only wasted the one full class forgetting why we were there, but reading his code (labeled by week) then scribbling on the whiteboard was his lecture
I guess I ended up understanding data structures and I never fell asleep, so maybe he wasn’t a bad teacher. It was just mostly just assignments, he didn’t really do quizzes and the final wasn’t much of the grade
I was thinking that you meant like, machine code, by “low level” and yeah. C wouldn’t make a lot of sense to someone who handles machine code.
I’d call that hardware - if you’re code enough to the metal to be writing machine code (or even assembly), the physical architecture of the hardware is part of your code
Low level generally is one step up - manual access to memory, compiling to an architecture rather than a virtualization layer, etc
Strangely, the guy that taught OO theory did our hardware class, we built bit shifters and wrote programs in risc assembly… And ONE program in machine code with the promise we’d never have to do it again
I could understand someone who writes in assembly, but machine code is a nightmare…I think I got it without any mistakes, but my butthole was clenched for 4 hours, terrified I’d have to debug it
Right. That’s my bad. I’m not a programmer or developer, so I conflate machine code and assembly far too frequently.
Why data structures weren’t in C/C++? It would make sense to care about structures, cache locality, SoA/AoS, indirections and stuff in some language that compiles in native code.
Ah, I phrased that ambiguously - it was in C++, all of our computing theory type classes were.
I just got distracted realizing I graduated proficient in 9 languages and reasonably comfortable in another 3. 2 were from internships, but the rest were all from coursework. The last couple years, I was juggling 2-4 at all times, plus the odd scripts
I always thought I was really good at picking up and switching languages, but I just realized my program was designed that way.
That feels like a lot, do other colleges do something similar?
(I guess you could knock off 3 because we ended up switching every semester in software engineering because cross platform apps were pretty bad at the time)
My undergrad officially required Pascal, C, C++, Java, PHP, Prolog, Lisp, x86 and MIPS assembly. You couldn’t work around those. There was also Tiger, VHDL, and Bash that were required, but you would probably not count as languages. (I’m certainly forgetting some stuff too.)
There was a virtual certainty you’d need some more languages, but not everybody would need the same ones.
My best presentation at university was during a small seminar. It was a 45min talk about 3 papers and how they relate to each other. I procrastinate a lot, so I didn’t really do anything besides reading those papers until the day before my presentation. That day, a friend called for a spontaneous barbecue, so I had just an odd hour to actually prepare slides. I managed 8 slides in total, the rest I just impromptu recalled from memory. People liked it and it was the least effort I put in any talk I held at university.
reading those papers
Woah there Mr. Overachiever, you’re making the rest of us look lazy…
Honestly, that’s the right way to do it if you really know your stuff.
The slides are there as a visual aid or backdrop. The “presenter notes” is where all your bulleted items and prompts for recollection go.
Also, and this is where a lot of people get it wrong, the slide deck is NOT a useful document for distribution. It is specific to both the subject matter and speaker; it’s analogous to sheet music. A video of the presentation (e.g. TED) is far more useful as we’re really talking about a performance. At worst, there should be “references” page in some appendix, with hyperlinks to actual media that folks can digest on their own time.
what’s a slide deck?
The slides in the presentation. Old people term
It really baffles me when people make presentations like this. It’s such an easy thing to correct as well but it just keeps happening.
I assume it’s passive aggressive when they’re forced to present instead of email.
deleted by creator
Some people seem to get off on taking longer than necessary
In university I had a prof that used an overhead projector and a marker to slowly follow the lines drawn on the sheets.
I’d have given anything for a few PowerPoint slides.
It’s even more fun when your manager makes you do a presentation. And he schedules it at 10pm, so that all the people 12 timezones away can attend at their “morning time.”
But they don’t even bother to join the zoom. The only people attending are also in your timezone up way later than they want to be. And he’s like “it’s ok, we’ll record it for them.” Like wtf.
And then they go and do stupidass incorrect shit anyway, whether they watched the recording or not.
stupidass incorrect shit
like scheduling a meeting at 10pm
If you seriously wanted to communicate something, you wouldn’t do a presentation.
The comic strip sounds like someone made a plugin to export obsidian vaults to .pptx
Check out
pandocThis comic strip sounds like a 20 year-old Dilbert comic with all the wit removed.
Dilbert comics have wit?
- part one, How the Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind
- part two, How the Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind
![Death by PowerPoint [Work Chronicles]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4f415e52-28ad-4ac6-86ca-2947f664acb8.jpeg){kind=link}