DIY Librarian

I described my first slide-free workshop as “flying by the seat of my pants”. Last week I taught a follow-up workshop, again without slides but with more preparation, and it felt great. I gave the students a handout with the URLs for the sites we used and some screenshots to jog their memories later, and during the workshop I focused on talking directly to the students and demonstrating the skills I was teaching. The students seemed much more engaged than I remember them being in previous years, and they asked lots of good questions. A few even followed up by making appointments with me for additional instruction.

I don’t think that it was the elimination of slides that improved the workshop. I think eliminating the slides made me focus on the content of the presentation and on my speaking style.

As John Dupuis says in Confessions of a Science Librarian, you can give a good presentation using PowerPoint, but you do have to put some effort into it.

I’m putting together another presentation for grad students, and I originally intended to use slides but to be very judicious about it. Well, when I made myself scrutinize each slide, I ended up deciding that I didn’t need any slides at all. So I think that’s my new rule: slides are just fine in presentations, but make sure their use is justified.

As promised, I did my workshop with no slides at all, and I really felt like I was without a safety net. (It didn’t help that I have been so busy that I didn’t have time to prepare very well. It also didn’t help that our teaching lab is extremely warm and not set up well for teaching.) But, the evaluations were very positive, and my students asked lots of questions. I would definitely do the workshop this way again, but with more preparation.

I’ve harped on PowerPoint enough in this blog. Time to cut it a little slack. Software doesn’t make bad presentations; poor speakers make bad presentations.

That’s the argument made by a post at Presentation Zen. I’ve been saving this post for months now, and attending a research symposium last week reminded me to finally post it.

The first speaker after lunch really stood out. There were two major differences between his presentation and the previous talks. He didn’t use PowerPoint, and he didn’t stand behind the podium. There was nothing wrong with the morning’s talks, but this one has stuck with me much longer.

I’m teaching a workshop this afternoon, and for the first time I’m doing it completely slide-free. My original intention was to use slides only where I needed to show participants something, but as I worked through my notes I decided the only thing I really need to show them is the live demonstration.

I’ll post an update after the workshop and let you know how it goes.

I get a daily email from the Chronicle of Higher Education that summarizes current articles. I’m going through some older emails today, and stumble across this description:

A PROFESSOR reduces his teaching life to a few bullet points.

Given all the recent discussion about bullet points and presentations, I had to read the column. In it, John D. Arras writes about the simple rules he follows in his teaching. Describing his final point, he writes:

I generally believe that PowerPoint is the spawn of Satan. It breeds passivity in the students and it disconnects the speaker from the audience. (It also encourages professors to reduce their deepest, most private thoughts on teaching to a few bullet points.)

Last week, after a presentation I gave using PowerPoint slides, someone mentioned that it was a bit odd to see me use PowerPoint after all the negative things I’ve said about PowerPoint on this blog.

Hi, my name is Tara and I’m a PowerPoint user.

I think that PowerPoint does a good job of allowing people to quickly and easily create and display electronic “slides”. It is surely not the only method of creating digital slides, but it’s familiar to users of Word and it’s widely available. I think it does a lousy job of helping people organize and write presentations.

When I prepared the presentation in question, I first jotted down a list of key points I wanted to make. These don’t necessarily correspond to slides. For example, when I’m introducing myself and telling the audience what the focus of my presentation will be, I want them focusing on me, not on a slide. (Did you know that if you press the “b” key during your presentation, the screen will go black? Pressing “b” again will bring your slide back.) If I started working on my presentation in PowerPoint, though, the natural tendency would be to make a slide for each talking point. In fact, the “outline” in PowerPoint is taken directly from the slides.

Then, I wrote out a draft of what I planned to say.

After all that, I looked at my draft and selected a few points that could use a visual—an example, a figure, or a summary of points made so far. I think it went well, and the audience seemed interested and responsive.

I don’t get excited when speakers post slides from a talk they’ve given. To me, it’s like getting the illustrations from a picture book without the words. PowerPoint can be a tool for good when it’s used to enhance a talk. But when it is allowed to take over the talk, I think it because a tool for evil.

Two recent posts address how library presentations can be improved, mainly by ceasing to rely on PowerPoint: CogDogBlog’s Presentation as Conversation and Steven Bell’s Better Writing and Presenting at ACRLog. Both focus on how presentations can be improved, whether they use PowerPoint or not, simply by not relying on PowerPoint. CogDogBlog introduces “Levine’s Law”: START WITH THE DEMO!

On a similar note, I had started and never finished a post about using blogs as an alternative to PowerPoint, as mentioned on Library Stuff and LawLibTech. Again, though, the point is not that PowerPoint makes presentations bad, but that using it to frame your thoughts can make your presentation bad. As Cindy Chick writes on LawLibTech:

the bottomline is, the organization of a presentation is something that should take place BEFORE you ever put virtual pen to paper (PowerPoint Alternatives - From Browsers to Blogs, Part II)

On Sunday, a I attended Blog U, a mini-conference attached to Web Search University. The faculty line-up was stellar (Blake Carver, LISNews; Steven M. Cohen, Library Stuff; Jane Dysart, Dysart & Jones; Amanda Etches-Johnson, blogwithoutalibrary.net; Sabrina Pacifici, beSpacific; Aaron Schmidt, walking paper; and Jill Stover, Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book). Their presentations were great, but the best part of the conference was how interactive it was. I really liked the format, with a few brief presentations and then time for questions interspersed throughout the day. It made me feel like my question didn’t have to apply directly to the presentation at hand, and it seemed to make the presenters more comfortable answering because they could defer to another presenter—or all provide an answer, which happened several times. I even asked some questions, something I’m often reluctant to do at sessions.

The presentations should be linked from the Blog U site soon, but you can also find most of them on the presenters’ blogs.

I particularly liked Schmidt’s not-PowerPoint slides. I’d read about Jessamyn’s HTML slides before, but this was the first chance I had to see them in action.

I felt like I, along with my colleague/friend Jen, was among the more advanced students, since we are already testing a WordPress blog behind the scenes at work, but I still learned quite a bit. In particular, I’m finding more ways to integrate the blog content into our website.

(With apologies to Ralph Wiggum.)

The Kept-Up Academic Librarian points out that the Learning 2005 conference will have no PowerPoint presentations, and wonders whether this idea would work at a library conference. In lieu of the ubiquitous slides, presenters are asked to prepare a “1 Pager”.

As Learning Designers we realize that the quantity of slides presented in a session is directly inverse to the level of interaction! (Learning 2005)

Something to ponder for those of us gearing up for another semester of instruction.