I think there's general agreement that at least some presentations are useful (thanks, Carsten) while others are bad (thanks, Keith). But I don't think we can agree that ALL presentations are useful or ALL presentations are bad.
So? Let the WG chairs decide. If we require that presentations be made available to the chairs well prior to the meeting, then they can review them and see which would be useful to set the context for the technical presentation, which others could just be made available for offline reading, and they can set the meeting agenda appropriately.
Cheers,
Andy
On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 5:41 AM Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 4/17/20 11:22 PM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
>> 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 find this way of framing the discussion ("presentations are good/bad")
unhelpful because a back-and-forth ("are not", "are too") isn't going to
reveal the subtleties required to make meetings more effective.
My point in bringing this back up is simply this: since we now have to
meet differently, at least for a while, it might make sense to try to
think about the most effective way of doing virtual meetings. Carrying
over habits from face-to-face meetings might not serve us well,
especially since (IMO) those habits didn't serve us that well for face
to face meetings.
> 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.)
yes, precisely, and good example.
Keith
