Study Hall over Powerpoint?

[Zelig]

The only questions I have are how to solve certain math and physics problems, and there are tutorials and aid centres for that.

So don't go to lectures if they're not useful to you.

 

[Souron]

That seems incredibly archaic and impractical.

I'd have to go buy index cards, buy a printer, figure out how to print on index-card size, and then hold a stack of index cards while I flip through them. I've got Powerpoint on my phone, at that point it would be far simpler to just flip through a PP deck on my phone than to screw around with pieces of paper - and if I'm going to do that, why not just put it up so that I can show charts and images to people?

If you're phone is easier to use for notes then cards or a piece of paper, then obviously you should use your phone.

Charts and images, if you have them may be useful to show your audience, but that's quite a different goal to showing your notes.

The only questions I have are how to solve certain math and physics problems, and there are tutorials and aid centres for that.

Then don't go to lectures, and teach yourself from the book and notes...

But the question of how someone should convey involved information to you, and you to others is still worth exploring.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

So don't go to lectures if they're not useful to you.

Then don't go to lectures, and teach yourself from the book and notes...

Not all of my lectures had notes like the one in the Amazon meeting though. There's still extra details that the professor speaks about.

 

[Birdjaguar]

If you are serious about finding ways to present complex data meaningfully, go here:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index

Buy his books; go to his seminar and the books are free.

 

[Quintillus]

I don't mind powerpoint, but it has to be used right. The absolutely wrong way to use it is to stand there and read every single bullet point and every single word on the slides that you show. That's bad.. very bad. I'm already sitting there reading the crap, I don't need another voice reading the same thing as me. Expand on your points, or go home. The powerpoint shoudl be a summary of your presentation, no more. If your'e just going to read the whole thing and that's it, we don't really need you there, now do we?

I didn't vote "Powerpoint is fine" because too often it's this absolute wrong way. Sometimes, there are good Powerpoint presentations.

On the other hand, this Amazon method sounds dreadful. If a memo is the best way of addressing something, just send out a memo in the first place! If people aren't reading it and they need to, you either need to (a) do a better job of communicating why they need to read it or (b) hire more people for the job, if it's because they really don't have enough time.

More generally it seems like the issue is choosing the right method of communication. If you've got a problem with executives interrupting excessively, and it's not just that they always do that no matter what (in which case it's probably a flaw of the executives), maybe instead of a Powerpoint with a medium-sized audience you should have had a small, all-talking-plus-perhaps-a-few-demos meeting with just a couple members of the team and a couple executives. One type of meeting doesn't work for all tasks. The best time for Powerpoint is generally explaining something to a decent-sized audience that isn't particularly familiar with the topic at hand.

This is based on my experience with meetings; not any formal theories.