Er...

[kickaha]

45 minute talk.

76 slides. (So far.)

What's wrong with this picture??

Cripes, and this is just an *overview*.

Frick.

Comments

[babbleon1.livejournal.com]

It takes people 1 - 3 minutes to absorb a slide (bullet-pointed or not), just because it takes a little time to change focus. You've got 30 - 50 slides too many.

Look at whether any of the information can go to speaker's notes - those can be printed out and it saves a lot of space in the slides. I treated the notes like the content and the slides as the chapter titles. Since readers are not always used to using the notes, either print them out yourself or note to the readers to print them out.

When do you have to have this done? I am very experienced with presentations and would be honored to help, if I could.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Well there's absolutely *NO* way to convey the information I need to in 20-25 slides, so that's right out. I tried that once with this same material. Nobody won. The slides were simply too dense to be absorbed easily at all, and their focus was on trying to absorb the slide, not on what I was saying. It just led to endless confusion.

I don't want them absorbing the slide, I want them to be listening to me. ;) The slide should, IMO, supplement what I'm saying, not try and replace it. Had an interesting conversation with actsofcreation about this last night, and he posited that the higher you go in the management chain, the less likely people are to read, well, *anything*, if it isn't presented on a PPT slide in bullet list form. Most people in business, knowing this, use that format as the default so they can do the presentation and the write-up at one shot, which makes sense.

It's a bit different in academia, and one of the best bits of advice I ever received from my advisor regarding presentations at conferences etc was: "Don't try and replicate the paper in the talk. The talk is an *advertisement* for the paper. Make it sing, make it dance, and make them *want* to go read the paper. You already did the detailed description once, no need doing it again where it doesn't easily fit." It really lightens the load that you have to try and convey during the talk, and frees you to just concentrate on selling the main ideas and principles. It's more of a sales pitch than anything. That's what I have to keep reminding myself of, because otherwise I'd be cramming 400+ pages of dense text and equations into 45 minutes. :}

There was a talk given by John Knight at Maryland about 15 years ago that is still talked about as one of the better talks the audience members had ever seen, and yet in a 60 min talk, he gave 4 slides. They were pictures. That had nothing to do with his talk. He said that he originally wasn't going to do slides, but he'd been told that was unprofessional, so he wanted them to be pretty things for the audience to 'rest their eyes on'.

Honestly, if I thought that I could get away with it, I'd be using no slides at all, just an overhead and pens. Most of the examples that are taking me fricking forever to do on the slide in animation could be done in 20 seconds with a pen. :P (And actually, that's about how long I'll probably spend on the corresponding slide.) One reason they're taking so long is that when there's a change in the slide, I try and animate it to show *exactly* what is going on. They don't have to try and figure out what changed, because I illustrate it exactly. More work on my end, less on theirs. I hope that will mean I can move through them faster. (A pen and acetate sheet would make this drop-dead simple, *and* get the point across more readily, but that's 'unprofessional'. Bleah.)

Re speaker's notes: where do you think all the bullet points went, in even more cryptic form? ;) Seriously, the slides are about as stripped out as can be at this point. I'm also using a bit of a cheat... if there are several ideas that flow from one to another, and I want to make sure they're all thinking about the *last* one moving foward, and not fixated on an earlier intermediate step, instead of using a bullet list, I use one item per slide, with Real Big Text. That way, the last visual they have is the single point I want them to carry forward. It takes a 1 minute bullet list slide and breaks it into three 20 second slides. It's a technique I saw in a presentation at ASE'03 that I really liked. Reduces what they have to absorb on each slide to two or three words.

I finally did a run-through, and it actually came in just over 46 minutes, so it looks like I'll be okay after all. It's just going to be a bit different than what most people are used to. Thanks for the offer, I think I'll be tapping your brain later this week for a couple of ideas. (El Rodeo? :) ) Oh, and I think it's tradition for me to be editing them up to 3:59 on Monday. Trying not to do that, however.

run-throughs are good.

[jinasphinx.livejournal.com]

What helped me most was to give the practice talks to a few different people. It's important to know how somebody coming in cold to the material will be able to follow it.

Re: run-throughs are good.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I've done one with the advisor now, but of course he's been hearing me blather about it for years. I've got a couple of suckers, er, I mean volunteers to help me out with that now. :)

[icebluenothing.livejournal.com]

Just edit them together in one big blipvert.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yeah, actsofcreation mentioned that he hoped I didn't have any epileptics on my committee, since I'd be flipping through them so fast I might induce seizures. :)

(Oh, and 82 now.)

[kimokeane.livejournal.com]

Interesting dilemma, but don't worry about it.

A Dissertation defense is unlike any other talk you'll ever give. They HAVE to be there, they HAVE to follow what you're presenting, and they've seen the document for a week (at least) beforehand. Given that the crowd will all have scientific backgrounds and will know much of the relevant background and/or a common scientific training, you can pump a lot more information down their eyeballs than in a more open forum.
And the talk is for them, not the wider audience - this is particularly true in your case, with that obscure, arcane crap ;)

[kimokeane.livejournal.com]

Also, I dunno about ComSci, but in Astro, much of the time your thesis dissertation is 3 distinct observing projects that all probe a single overall phenomenon. The oral presentation often just skips some of it - for example, you'll present the overall project background, then the data for one observing program, then the overall conclusions from the 3 programs together. Then the committee gets to probe on all of the observing programs and the conclusions, even if the wider audience doesn't get to see every picture.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the kind of maddening thing is that even with an insane number of slides (83 now), I'm *STILL* just skimming the surface! This whole talk is just designed to give everyone a *feel* for the work, and then they can go read the bloody tome if they want to.

And, on the 83rd slide, I hit a situation where a list might be easiest and most communicative. Drat.