Weiye Loh's Library tagged PowerPoint → View Popular, Search in Google

Feb

2012

Chris Mooney | Want to Improve Science Communication? Start with Bad PowerPoint Habits

While these organizations have the best of intentions, there may be inadvertent aspects of what they do that actually undermine their stated goals. In particular, in this piece I’m going to argue we can make science communication better not only by having lots of panels on the matter, but by changing some very simple and basic things about how scientists present their knowledge at conferences like AGU and AAAS.

www.desmogblog.com/on-start-bad-powerpoint-habits

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Science Communication Climate Science Conference Academic Research Academic PowerPoint

My focus on how scientists present at mega-conferences is not accidental. These conferences are, for many scientists, their number one opportunity to engage in the act of communication. Their talks, to be sure, are aimed towards their peers rather than public audiences. But nevertheless, the techniques and practices inculcated here surely have an oversized impact on scientists’ broader communication activities—including their classroom activities (where bad habits are also common).
Caught in a Bad PowerPoint. A cardinal sin of PowerPoint is putting lots of tiny words up on the screen, and then, basically, reading your notes to the audience. It certainly isn’t only scientists who do this—you see it everywhere. But scientists are often guilty parties in this respect.
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- importance of using your slides to visually enhance the talk, rather than just to put your own crib notes up for everybody to see.
- It is much easier for audiences to listen to you talk and simultaneously take in images that enhance what you’re saying, than for them to listen to you talk and also read the points you are making.
- you can have your notes in front of you, and you can have a sharable PowerPoint presentation, without ever having to put long sentences up on the screen for your audience to try to read. All you have to do is design and present your presentation in PowerPoint’s “presenter view,” which is really the best and, frankly, the only way to use this program.
- In presenter view, your notes are there for you to see, but you don’t have to show your speakerly underwear to the audience too. Instead, what they see can be striking images and (hopefully) well designed and clear graphs and figures that enhance the point that your making.
- At the American Geophysical Union meeting, I was told that my presentation could not be delivered using PowerPoint’s presenter mode. The reason I could not do so was because the projector in the room was configured to “mirror” the computer’s desktop.
  
  In other words, whatever I saw on my screen would also be what the audience saw. PowerPoint's presenter view, in contrast, requires “extending” the desktop so that you see one thing, and the audience sees another. (Microsoft has the deets on mirroring versus extending here.)