
LHC Physics Center bans Powerpoint, switches to whiteboard-only forums - indus
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/march-2014/physics-by-hand
======
Arjuna
Here is a perfect example: John Carmack does a great job of rocking the white-
board in this wonderful presentation. He starts out with a tablet, and uses
that to track his discussion points, then hits a deep-dive on the white-board
at approximately 00:18:45.

I find this style absolutely engaging. Presentation software like PowerPoint
has its place, but can make it all-too-easy to move through material too
quickly. On the other hand, actually drawing and writing things out while
discussing the topic slows things down a bit, allowing the audience to engage
and understand the topic at a more learning-friendly pace. I personally find
this "show me don't tell me" style of white-board presentation refreshing and
conducive to my understanding of the topic.

 _The Physics of Light and Rendering_

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4QuTe8aUw)

~~~
timr
Agreed, a thousand times over. I lived through the transition from chalkboard
+ transparency classrooms (high school) to whiteboard classrooms (college) to
powerpoint classrooms (grad school). I've also taught with all three.

The real shock for me came later in grad school, when the undergrads (these
were all upperclassmen) all basically _expected_ that you'd provide them with
the printouts of your slides, and therefore did nothing in class. They'd sit
there, diddle on their laptops or phones, and then get cranky and exasperated
when you'd tell them, "no, sorry...there are no slides. you have to take
notes."

Learning is simply _better_ when you have to write things down. You're
engaging your eyes, your ears and your brain...and you're well aware when
you're goofing off. I wish colleges would ban powerpoint in the classroom, but
since powerpoint is an epic crutch for the lecturer as well, I have my doubts
that it will ever happen....

~~~
dsrguru
> Learning is simply better when you have to write things down.

I disagree. Learning _is_ better when you aren't able to diddle on your laptop
or phone, and having to write things down strongly encourages you not to do
those things, but the actual act of writing things down forces you to focus on
quickly copying text, which hugely impairs your ability to internalize what
was said.

Some people's learning styles might make that less of a problem (i.e. so-
called auditory learners might be able to internalize what's being said nearly
at the speed it's spoken), but for those of us who need to translate what we
hear into our own mental language, constant note-taking substantially hampers
the learning process.

The ideal for me is to preview the notes of a lecture before it's given a la
Khan Academy, pay full attention during the lecture, occasionally jot down a
keyword to trigger the memory of a thought I had during the lecture, and if I
didn't have the opportunity to preview the lecture notes then I'll want to be
able to access them afterwards to look up anything I don't remember.

Edit: Corrective upvote because you didn't say anything that harms the
discussion.

~~~
wisty
> Some people's learning styles might make that less of a problem (i.e. so-
> called auditory learners might be able to internalize what's being said
> nearly at the speed it's spoken), but for those of us who need to translate
> what we hear into our own mental language, constant note-taking
> substantially hampers the learning process.

Learning styles is more or less discredited. IIRC, research indicated that
most students respond similarly to the same learning styles. The main
difference between students tends to be whether or not they understand
previous material.

I'm not saying that different mediums is a bad idea - most students _do_
respond well to diagrams, explanations, examples, practice, etc.

Research supports note taking, so it's probably a good thing for most
students. However, it might not be good for all subjects - math and
programming requires a lot less memorisation of facts, and a lot more
thinking. If you want to understand dynamic programming, simply memorising the
key points won't help you much. If you want to learn a new API, then writing
down important methods might.

~~~
jacobolus
Speaking only for myself, taking copious notes in class always substantially
hampered my ability to keep up. The only times I took such notes were in a
couple of mathematics courses which moved at a blistering pace and had no
textbook or other provided material: in those, it was essential to write
everything down so that it could be studied and learned later, after class.
But the act of writing during those classes made it quite a bit harder to
follow the lectures while they were happening.

I would have much preferred to receive hand-outs with the same
definitions/theorems on it a day or two before the lecture, so that I could
have put my full attention on the professor and the material.

In basically all other courses, I only wrote notes when struck by particularly
insightful thoughts I wanted to remember later, and my notes as often were
about my own reactions as about what the professors were saying. But because I
find it easy to focus and pay close attention in lectures, I generally had
better recall afterward than most of my peers, even the ones who spent much
more time “studying” their notes later.

* * *

By contrast, I had several friends who could only follow lectures by writing
notes while in class, because otherwise they found lectures hard to focus on,
and because they found that the physical act of writing what they heard to
enormously help their later recall (not to mention they had a physical
artifact they could refer to afterward).

* * *

I would like to see your sources for the statement “learning styles is more or
less discredited”, as it does not align with my experience either as a
student, as an observer of other students, or as the son of a school teacher.
It seems completely obvious and non-controversial to me that some people have
an easier time following verbal conversation than others, that some have an
easier time reading/writing, that some people are more attuned to
pictures/graphic elements, etc.

Maybe “learning styles” is a bad name for this, and I personally believe that
it’s mostly the result of practice and acculturation rather than anything
genetic/inherent, but it still remains obviously (to me) true that different
students find different modalities and teaching/learning methods more
effective.

~~~
wisty
There's evidence for note taking, as I previously said. The main difference
may have been that you had a good grounding in the subject, so taking basic
notes would have been a waste of time.

As for learning styles being discredited ...

Treat education like alternative medicine, and ask for evidence _for_ teaching
methods, rather than evidence against. The amount of puffery some educators
believe in is amazing. Education researchers are often even worse. Yes, other
industries can be just as bad (software included), but that's no excuse.
Especially when there _is_ a lot of research on teaching methods, it's just
routinely ignored by the theorists.

For a review on learning styles, see
[http://steinhardtapps.es.its.nyu.edu/create/courses/2174/rea...](http://steinhardtapps.es.its.nyu.edu/create/courses/2174/reading/Pashler_et_al_PSPI_9_3.pdf)

There's a huge body of literature concerning learning styles, but the actual
evidence often tends to contradict the hypothesis.

If you pick any popular teaching method, and search for it and the word
"evidence", it's often pretty dire.

Yes, some students say they _prefer_ one learning style, especially if you ask
them (which is kind of a loaded question). But they don't seem to individually
benefit more than other students. There's exceptions, I guess. Students with
visual impairments.

You could probably find evidence supporting the use of mixed mediums (show
'em, tell 'em, make 'em do it themselves), but that's different to saying
"show some students, and tell others".

~~~
Perseids
As yet another individual who is hampered by copying down the lecture I'd like
to provide some more anecdotal evidence.

> There's evidence for note taking, as I previously said. The main difference
> may have been that you had a good grounding in the subject, so taking basic
> notes would have been a waste of time.

I guess we are talking about different kind of lectures. My experience comes
from 5 years of mathematical courses with very dense material. Just taking
"basic notes" doesn't cut it there, because only an approximation of a
definition is mostly worthless. And regarding proofs, if I understand the
subject good enough that I can boil down the essential steps of a proof while
seeing it for the first time then I don't really need to take notes at all. So
I'm actually always forced to copy everything from the blackboard (if there
are no official lecture notes).

And in these situations my brain is blocked with drawing characters instead of
processing what is actually happening behind those characters. Yet, I do have
friends that copy everything down, even if there are official lecture notes,
because according to them it helps them processing the content. Whether a
classification in auditory, etc. types is reasonable or not I don't know, but
from this experience alone I find it obvious that people learn in different
ways.

~~~
XorNot
I had a realization in around 3rd year of my first degree that when I was
copying down notes I wasn't actually hearing anything the lecturer said.

I basically got a page of text, but I had no idea what it meant - worse for
mathematics.

Since I'm back at uni again, I've been trying various lecturer absorption
styles, and trying to keep detailed notes still has the same problem - I can't
actually follow what's being said. To an extent I don't even _hear_ it.

------
deckiedan
Phew. Finally the reign of powerpoint begins to fade.

If non-technical speakers spent less time faffing around before the session
making awful looking powerpoints, and more time learning how to speak
engagingly, the world would be a much better place.

This said as an Audio/Visual Operator who has spent hundreds of hours at a
sound-desk watching technically inept speakers fail to impress - no matter how
flashy the animations.

The worse thing over the last few years is 'Prezi'. It's a powerpoint
alternative which ostensibly makes it easier to make awesome looking graphics.

The 2 problems with it are that it's a hell of a lot harder to actually
present on a second screen, so you end up having to drag windows around, and
that speakers are still under the impression that because you have swooshes
and zooms and text folding inside other text, suddenly it's more likely for
people to find the presentation content interesting.

The trouble with BAD technology, is how do you fight it? The normal way is by
competition - making _better_ tech. But when the concept itself is wrong, but
somehow culturely accepted...? Any ideas?

~~~
mattfenwick
One of the biggest problems with PowerPoint presentations is their linearity
(i.e. one-dimensional). Most topics, stories, etc. are not linear.

We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations.

A good start that I've tried was to make a 10-foot-by-10-foot drawing on
GoogleDocs, and then arrange all my content within that one slide. Since it's
a two-dimensional canvas, there's plenty of opportunities for putting related
topics close to each other, even if you talk about them at separate times.
It's also effective to put loops in your procession, so that you return to a
topic that you covered earlier, reiterating its significance and reminding the
audience of it. (Another advantage is that you can save it as a PDF. Then open
it in a program, such as Chrome, which lets you zoom in as far as you want.
You'll never have to worry about text being too small to read again!)

~~~
vonmoltke
It's funny, but overhead projectors were great for that. You could easily
throw random foils on it as needed. You could draw on foils in real time with
a marker. Hell, you could throw on a blank foil and draw on that if you
wanted. We need a modern replacement for the overhead, and PowerPoint ain't
it.

~~~
Crito
Maybe we just need overhead projectors back.

There were a few things wrong with them (painful to look at while operating,
and the bulbs tended to burn out if you moved them around while turned on) but
fundamentally I don't think they were broken technology. Overhead projectors
would be well _complimented_ by computer projectors, but computer projectors
make a poor _replacement_ for them. Attempts to replicate the advantages of
overhead projectors on computer projectors always fall flat, as far as I have
seen.

I think the demise of overhead projectors is an example of a _regression_
caused by our tendency to have rose-tinted glasses whenever considering more
technological alternatives to existing technology.

~~~
Genmutant
In university we have cameras over some parts of the professors table which
are directly projected on the screen. Works great without the the drawbacks of
an overhead projector.

~~~
Crito
I think that is probably the solution. I've seen somewhat similar systems that
tried to be more technically advanced than that, but they always made things
worse. Just a straight-up camera-feed to the projector would work great
though.

The advantage of these over overhead projectors would still be pretty small
though (really only the being blinded and replacement bulbs issue), so you
would need to ensure that the system is rock-solid reliable. If not, then
you've just made it worse by making it more advanced.

~~~
Steuard
Document cameras like this work very nicely, but there _is_ one small downside
I've noticed: their framerate tends not to be very good. That's usually not a
problem at all, but I have a couple of physics demos where I roll things
around on an overhead projector, and the document camera often can't keep up
with quick motion. Simple analog light and shadows obviously have no issues
with that at all.

------
ColinWright
Just as the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any
language[0], the truly inept presenter can produce bad talks with any tools.

[0]
[http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html](http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html)
\- see [1] for context.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pascal)
\- see [2] for an alternative viewpoint.

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
A real programmer can build their slide deck in code. Not that this fixes the
problem, but I was greatly inspired when I saw Matthew Flatt present with
SlideShow [1] for the first time.

[1]
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1166020](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1166020)

~~~
Jtsummers
A non-paywalled version of it (unless I missed the download link on that
site):

[http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/jfp05-ff.pdf](http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/jfp05-ff.pdf)
[PDF]

------
killerdhmo
PowerPoint isn't the enemy. Poor use of PowerPoint is the problem. Bad
presenters is the problem. People switching over to white boards won't make
them better presenters, now they'll be communicating poorly in a messy
unshareable medium.

The solution isn't no PowerPoint. The solution is teach people how to
communicate. How to present to both technical and nontechnical audience. How
to write an executive summary / elevator pitch.

~~~
InclinedPlane
PowerPoint encourages and rewards a particular style of communication (the
"pitch") which is unsuitable for most uses. It also actively discourages many
more effective forms of communication. As such most of the time using it does
degrade the quality of communication and not using it is an easy route to
improving the quality of communication.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to use powerpoint well. Hell, it's possible
to write world class code in Perl. It's possible to build skyscrapers in a
swamp. That doesn't mean you should force yourself to do so. It's always
smarter to stack the odds in your favor as much as possible.

~~~
ksk
People who are being presented to know when they are and aren't absorbing the
material being presented. Its rather easy give your opinion on the cases where
it doesn't work. It would be far more helpful if you had suggested specific
alternatives..

------
GuiA
On the topic, I love Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint":
[http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint](http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint)

------
lqdc13
I prefer Powerpoint over white/blackboard because:

1\. People make mistakes on the whiteboard

2\. You can't save it and review later

3\. Even if you write everything down, it would still be less information than
what someone could add in the Powerpoint

4\. Powerpoint is much more legible

5\. It is easier to go at your own pace during and after the presentation if
someone is using a Powerpoint. If someone is using a white/blackboard they are
going to erase the last part very quickly after they finished writing it down.

~~~
keithpeter
Suggest you look at interactive whiteboards or similar. Best of both worlds
_potentially_. See my comment up the page.

~~~
yeukhon
The core issue is preparation and this is something spontaneous whiteboard
lecture can't beat a well-preapred powerpoint presentation.

~~~
baq
completely disagree. my calculus and algebra professors never used powerpoint
on any lecture and they were extremely well prepared. those were the best
classes on the whole uni.

~~~
yeukhon
Your disagreement is not very convincing IMHO. How do you know other teachers
didn't use whiteboard? Maybe your professors are articulate, experienced
instructors.

Also, your teachers probably teach the same course over and over. They don't
do spontaneous, once-in-a-life-time lecture to you. They know what they have
to teach today and tomorrow. They know exactly what proof to use. Unlike
university lecture, the discussion forum at LHC in the article are probably
one-time open brownbag. They raise an interesting question, they talk and they
leave the room.

~~~
keithpeter
_" They don't do spontaneous, once-in-a-life-time lecture to you."_

True, but you do vary presentation to allow for audience. I use 'room
temperature' questions early on; rows of confused faces and I go into the slow
siding; rapid fire answers and extensions and I shift into the express route.
Mixed reactions and I have been known to split the whiteboard down the middle.

So less a linear video tape and more a series of responses deployed depending
on feedback from the class

I am teaching _below_ University level though, and smaller classes (15 to 25
people).

~~~
yeukhon
True, completely agree. But that's a skill :) you could have a teacher writing
on the whiteboard for 45 minutes and zero interaction. A similar analogy would
be kids abuse the right to start out an introduction paragraph with a quote or
a question.

------
mastermojo
I've heard that writing equations on a whiteboard paces the talk and give the
audience time to digest. With a slideshow most presenters will go at a pace
comfortable for them, but that typically ends up being too fast for the
audience.

------
baby
I don't understand this. Most of my teachers use blackboards and it's really
annoying to follow a presentation like that, you have to wait for the person
to write, you have no slides later on to support your notes, and since you
have no slides online you have to write everything they write, so you can't
even listen properly to the talk.

And some stuff are just clearer on slides... I don't really see a lot of
benefits in whiteboard-only lectures. Combination of whiteboard and slides are
best.

I can still think of some great people who don't use slides but it's rare and
a few people do it well (Gilbert Strang comes to my mind[1]).

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c)

~~~
snotrockets
You don't need slides to support your notes. There are two kind of classes:
those that bring you up to speed; all the stuff there is found in textbooks or
review papers.

And those that present wholly new ideas (research seminars, conferences,)
where you can just read the paper or the preprint for details.

The only time I've seen something on the board that I really had to copy down
to keep an copy of was exercises and their solutions.

~~~
baby
if your teacher has a textbook that he follows okay, but here in France most
teachers don't and you have to copy everything they write. And even if they
have a course online, they will waste so much time just writing it...

------
yeukhon
I can see why scientists like whiteboard. In the old days, if you watch old
clips from the 30s, 40s you would see scientists talking to their fellow peer
with chalk and cardboard. They could start by saying "okay so we know this gas
law from 1800s and then we saw this new behavior and we started investigating
blah blah and then we came up with this new equation and here is the proof
blah blah." That was the old days. Whiteboard worked fine.

But was it fine? If you are delivering to five people, probably. What about
10, 20, 30, 100, 300?

These are the things to consider when giving a presentation:

1\. your target audience

2\. time constraint

3\. technology and tools available

4\. scope of your presentation (is this a lecture, a short 15-minute progress
report, or a workshop)

 _“Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more
interaction and curiosity,” says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of
physics at Florida State University and a co-organizer of the forum. “We
wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.”_

You see, if you are giving a two-hour workshop to a small group of scientists
which everyone knows each other, the discussion can become interesting. But if
you are giving a 30-minute workshop, a 30-minute talk to a larger group of
people, whiteboard-free-style presentation breaks down.

The main problem is that only a handful of people will fully comprehend what
the speaker is up to regardless of which method. Some people are slower at
picking up new ideas. It could be experience, language barrier (and sometimes
it's the speaker's accent) or misunderstanding. People fear of asking dumb
questions in front of a large group of experts so in the end it's just an
interaction of the speaker with a handful of experts. The rest will just nod
and follow on.

Neither powerpoint nor whiteboard could solve the main problem entirely. But
with powerpoint, one could traverse back and forth and audience does not have
to suffer illegible handwriting (and in large group people could be sitting in
the far back). This is something whiteboard-only discussion can't.

So if they run a small group discussion, chalkboard is fine. But if they run a
large group discussion, I argue start with slides and supplement with
whiteboard. Slides should be there to deliver textual information, graphical
information which are hard to explain or to follow on a whiteboard.

~~~
1ris
What I see as pretty good is the usage of touchscreens. Thinkpad tablets are
very popular, but also huge (24 inch and bigger) monitors installed
permanently. The presenter than can display a powerpoint presentation (usually
it's actually Beamer and consists of mostly white pages) and write directly
into it. There is some structure given (and displaying Images and video is
much better), and yet the advantages of the cardboard remain. It's even
possible to flip back and forth.

~~~
yeukhon
I agree. It's nice to have both. Coursea/Udacity style. A lot of courses have
formal lecture in ppt/pdf and then instructor writes over the presentation.

------
ThePhysicist
Now that's a great experiment! I think the use of Powerpoint is useful and
mandated under certain circumstances (e.g. if you want to show experimental
data), but when discussing a concept with your peers, working on a whiteboard
is better for various reasons:

1\. It forces you to think more about what you want to say and how you're
going to write it down beforehand.

2\. It sets a uniform pace for your presentation (writing stuff down is harder
than advancing slides)

3\. It lets your audience follow the train of thought that lead you to the
results your presenting and allows your content to unfold before their eyes.

4\. It invites participation and allows for easy modification and adaption of
your content during your presentation (try that with Powerpoint).

That said, structuring a good whiteboard talk/presentation is hard work too
and I've seen many people (including professors) fail at it.

------
captainmuon
As a particle physicist, I wholeheartedly welcome this. Our meetings, of which
we tend to have 4-5 a week, are usually Powerpoint* orgies. Because of the
intensly dense slides, its often hard to follow, and people don't listen to
the reader but read the slides. Even worse, they think "I'll read the slides
later" and work on their laptops in meetings. It's not rare to see 2/3 of a
meeting work like sheep on their laptops (especially in larger meetings and
talks), and only a small fraction is actually doing something talk related
like viewing the slides, or doing actually urgent work. As a consequence, we
have banned the use of laptops during talks in our group. What is completely
normal everywhere else was a small sensation in our group, but I think
everybody agreed that it is better now.

We can't realistically ban Powerpoint, since as experimentalists we have to
discuss lots of graphics and plots. What we did try once was to use our lab
books instead. Every (PhD, Masters) student would write a summary of their
week's progress in their lab books, including printed out plots, and we would
project it with one of these old-fashioned book-projectors. It was nice
because you could also go back and look at the details in the lab book, and it
would give you an incentive to keep your books correctly. Unfortunately, it
became unpractical as our group grew, and also because we have a lot of
collaborators from other groups who are connected via video.

\----

* Or Libreoffice, Keynote or Latex Beamer

~~~
welterde
What we do in our group is to put all plots and images into a wiki and at the
meetings each person in turn would then just tell the person behind the laptop
what page to navigate to, etc.

------
coherentpony
This is dumb; my handwriting sucks. I'd hate to give a hand-written talk.

~~~
fcmk
I don't think this is a good attitude. It similar to saying "Give
presentations? This sucks. My presentation skills suck. I'd have to give a
talk." Both presentation skills and handwriting are attributes you can improve
and if they are part of your job, you should improve them. People seem to
think handwriting as something not worth working on, as the last time it was
on the table was when we were children. Or maybe they see it as fixed and
unmalleable.

~~~
coherentpony
You try explaining that to 250 students that can't read what you write. "It'll
be ok, my handwriting will improve over time," doesn't exactly fly too well.

Also note that it's pretty hard to give numerical results to a computation on
the blackboard. A plot generated by a computer program and embedded on a
Beamer slide is optimal in this case.

My handwriting is improving, and I do try to improve. The fact you didn't
glean that from my, albeit curt, response is hardly cause for putting words
into my mouth. I appreciate the feedback though.

------
neurobro
I would hope they also ban whiteboards. Very difficult to see, and the markers
become translucent after about 1cm of chalk-equivalent use.

------
wehadfun
Banning powerpoint is a stupid reaction to some anti-powerpoint movement.
Professors trapped in a college system that does not reward actual teaching is
the problem. The powerpoints are just a symptom

~~~
snotrockets
The academic system main goal isn't teaching, but research. You need to teach
to train new researches, but teaching isn't an end goal.

~~~
wehadfun
People are taking out 6 figure loans to be taught not to further a
universities research goals.

~~~
gajomi
You mean 5 figure loans right? Five figures are quite common (I am paying one
off myself) but I think 6 is really quite rare.

In any case, with few exceptions tuition money does not get used to conduct
any kind of research. Most of it will go towards some combination of paying
for administration, facilities, and teaching fees for non-tenured lecturers
(in the parlance of the US system). In fact, at most Tier I research
institutions research grants are actually subsidizing educational expenses
with various mechanisms built in to most awards requiring expenditures to this
effect.

------
Tomis02
Interesting fact - the usage Powerpoint-like presentations was one of the
communication weaknesses that led to the Columbia shuttle disaster. A very
good read about that here - [http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0001yB)

More here -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_shuttle_disaster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_shuttle_disaster)

------
yomritoyj
Having the speaker write out things on a board also has the advantage of
giving the listeners time to think through what has gone before. In my
experience this leads to more interesting discussion.

I'm a teacher of economics and the only time I use slides is when I have to
present a lot of data or literal text like the statements of theorems. Even in
these situations I think distributing printed handouts works much better. But
that involves logistics and expense.

------
twowo
It is probably not centred around encouraging discussion but it reminds me of
a beautiful piece from Peter Norvig:
[http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm](http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm)

------
mamcx
Somethings are better without powerpoint-like presentation, but is possible to
use it correctly.

I have used the ideas behind
[http://www.presentationzen.com/](http://www.presentationzen.com/) with good
results.

Based on that, my mom setup a service to build that kind of presentations at
[http://www.emilypresenta.com/](http://www.emilypresenta.com/) (the site is in
spanish for now), including finding, buying the photos/icons and the provide a
basic layout for the talking part.

------
aaronetz
Reminds me of the Anti-PowerPoint Party[1] (which was linked to on HN at some
point). I would also like to say that I personally find whiteboard
presentation much easier to follow. I taught a little bit too, but used
slides, because it was easier. Maybe banning computer slides isn't such a bad
idea...

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
PowerPoint_Party](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-PowerPoint_Party)

------
devindotcom
I don't mean to be a naysayer, but it's not like the entire LHC international
organization banned Powerpoint. This is one forum at one arm of one project at
the LHC.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great, but this is quite a small group we're
talking about. I guess this is what the meetings look like:

[http://i.imgur.com/kNJOySY.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/kNJOySY.jpg)

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dkuntz2
It's not even at the LHC, it's at Fermilab, half a world away...

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mnl
Good for them, but the truth is that every analysis group at CERN uses Beamer,
Keynote or even Powerpoint for the almost everyday meetings via pdfs submitted
to Indico (coupled with Vidyo). There's no reasonable alternative. Another
completely different scenario are lectures or theoretical talks, there it
never made much sense/it's a waste of time.

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vishaldpatel
Awesome awesome awesome! Physics classes at the LHC turned from nap-time for
all to nap-time for some :D

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sentenza
I'd say it makes sense for equation-heavy fields. The biophysics stuff I did
during my Phd, however, worked very well with Powerpoint. I'd always have the
images-and-diagrams-only presentation without text as my goal, which I usualy
managed to almost-achieve.

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analog31
In my view, nothing is more debilitating than trying to use PowerPoint for
equations. I end up with severe eyestrain headaches and neck fatigue after an
hour or so. For this reason I've given up on typeset equation altogether.

I attend occasional academic talks at the nearby university, and am seeing a
growing trend towards simply pasting equations into PowerPoint in whatever
their original format, such as MatLab or some programming language.

But I work in a business setting right now, and I've learned that equations in
a presentation are taboo. A lot of non technical people assume if they see an
equation, that the work is incomplete, otherwise you'd give an answer instead
of an equation.

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irremediable
> A lot of non technical people assume if they see an equation, that the work
> is incomplete, otherwise you'd give an answer instead of an equation.

Jeez. I mean, I agree that it's poor form to stuff a presentation full of
equations, but what a dumb reason that is... :(

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rachellaw
reminds me of my old philosophy professor, he never used slides or anything.
Just transparencies and "a magic lantern" hahaha -- he didn't even call'em
projectors!

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lifeisstillgood
well word has long since ceased to be relevant (in the code literate world)
Markdown, wiki mark up or similar has taken its place (and LaTeX always was
close to ending it ) Now PowerPoint will join it as S5 and the like take over.

just wondering if the spreadsheet will be the only survivor

