> On 2020-04-18, at 03:26, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On 4/17/20 9:21 PM, Carsten Bormann wrote: > >> I wish we could squash that indiscriminate “presentations are bad” meme. > > I wish we could squash the notion that face-to-face meetings should be filled with presentations, with only a small amount of time left for discussion. We’ve been through this 500 times before. If somebody reminds people that presentations are useful, this scare crow is always cited as the inevitable outcome. It’s not, folks, and the point is that we want to have the productive presentations and not the unproductive ones (where productivity is measured in the progress made in the ensuing discussion). I don’t think anybody believes that no-discussion meetings are useful. The fact that chairs sometimes fail to prevent the scary scenario you evoke indicates a lack of focus; having to end a discussion when it just started to generate interesting results is a serious problem. Maybe we need more chair training on agenda setting. And maybe some AD coaching. I’ve seen agenda that didn’t even have planned slot durations in them; that has to stop (as well as the fixation on keeping to those durations, I might add). It is much less of a problem to end a meeting early because the agenda was kept clean; even more so for online (“virtual”) meetings. With good planning, items can also be pushed off the agenda dynamically if others have needed more time. Yes, being a chair is **difficult**; I’m so happy that I once again handed over my WG chairing responsibilities to younger chairs. Instead of re-hashing this age-old thread, I’d rather focus on the new tools we have available now. Moving a whole university to digital tends to sharpen one’s mind on these. (My wife, with her 40 years of university teaching experience, just uploaded her first narrated slides this week, and that may indeed be a tool we want to embrace.) Grüße, Carsten
