Re: Useful slide tex (was - Re: English spoken here)

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On 12/02/2012 03:57 PM, joel jaeggli wrote:
On 12/2/12 11:15 AM, Keith Moore wrote:
On 12/02/2012 01:46 PM, joel jaeggli wrote:
We have non-native english speakers and remote participants both working at a disadvantage to follow the discussion in the room. We should make it harder for them by removing the pretext that the discussion is structured around material that they can review and follow along on? I don't think that's even remotely helpful.

In general, the purpose of those meetings is *discussion*, not presentation. I'm all for exploring better ways to facilitate *discussion* among the diversity of IETF meeting attendees. But our experience with use of previously-prepared PowerPoint presentations to facilitate *discussion* shows that use of that tool, in that way and for that purpose, is a miserable failure.
Since you and I attend a significant number of the same working groups we should have some shared experience, but I'm going to flat out disagree. It's possbile that we had completely different experiences in the same meetings, but I do firmly believe that slides are facilitatiing both the speakers coverage of the problems they're trying to address, and the participants dicussion of the problems enumerated.

I saw very little productive discussion happening in Atlanta in the vast majority of working group meetings which I attended. True, there were times when people queued up at the microphones. (though that's actually a pretty inefficient way to have a discussion.) The vast majority of the time in nearly every session I attended was occupied by speakers standing at the front of room in front of a screen of mostly text, and a room full of people who were mostly not paying attention.

(and when people did try to discuss things, the chairs kept trying to cut the lines short because they had more PRESENTATIONS to get through....arrgh.)

Of course I'd encourage speakers to make available for download summaries of the material to be discussed in advance of the meeting, for the benefit of non-native English speakers and others. PowerPoint (or better, PDF of material prepared in PowerPoint) seems like a reasonable format for that.

the reflexive reference to a particular tool isn't a helpful point of this discussion imho...

I think people understand that I'm not talking specifically about a particular tool for creating presentations. It doesn't matter which tool you use, the problem is the notion that meeting time should consist primarily (or even significantly) of presenters standing in front of a screen on which mostly-text is being displayed, and the content of what is being said closely corresponds to what is on the screen. A related problem is that people are paying attention to the words on the screen which is distracting them from what is actually being said. And because the bitrate of the information being presented is low, people tend to not pay much attention anyway, and they tend do things that further distract from the meeting.

"PowerPoint" is just a convenient one-word shorthand for this phenomenon. The problem isn't the specific tool that's being used, but the phenomenon almost inherently comes with use of PowerPoint or any of several similar tools. And everybody has seen it happen and associates it with the word PowerPoint.

What matters is that a lot of meeting time is being wasted by filling it up with presentations, and by trying to have discussions using media and techniques and habits that are better suited for presentations. (though the idea that PowerPoint and similar tools even help to facilitate good presentations is itself pretty dubious.)

I also think it would be quite helpful to arrange for the topics discussed and points raised in the discussion to be displayed in the room in real time, as they are typed. This would provide non-native speakers with visuals similar to what they see now with PowerPoint, but without the undesirable side-effect of coercing discussion time into presentations. This would also reinforce the need for a minute-taker and help to keep the minute-takers honest.
This is a meeting workflow change, I can think of several ways to approach it. as with note taking, jabber scribing and managing remote participants it requires someone to do the work (though it may overlap with one of the other activities).

Of course. And I'm not set on a particular approach; I just want to facilitate more effective discussion (and in a way that tries to accommodate those who have trouble understanding the speakers).

But I do suspect that somehow the job of typing something that appears immediately on the screen, might be more appealing than the job of taking minutes or being a Jabber scribe. If one person typing could do an adequate job of all of the above, that would be nice, as we'd need fewer volunteers.

(I doubt that PowerPoint is the best tool for this purpose, since it would be highly desirable to convey the same information, at the same time, to remote participants.)

it would be helpful abstract the tool dicussion away from particular applications, at the heart of the problem, is not which text/media formatting application is used.
I don't think you can completely divorce the discussion from mention of these tools and still have a useful discussion.

Keith



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