Actually, I like wet-erase markers. I used to make notes on my mirror.
Chalk: cheap and simple, it always works
Dry-erase markers: get with the program, guys.
PowerPoint: Move into the 21st Century
Cold chisel & mallet: permanence
Order of Kilopi
Actually, I like wet-erase markers. I used to make notes on my mirror.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
Not a single power point fan.
I knew it. It's one of those products that only exist because there's people who can tell other people what to do. Like Roman sinew driven catepults.
The process of making sinew rope is so stinky and repellent it didn't matter if it was the absolute best catepult "rubber bands", even today. You need slaves who know you'll really throw their backsides to the lions to make sinew rope in the quantities they needed, as several reproduction societies have found out.
Administrator
As I said in an earlier post, I think it is highly dependent upon the use.Originally Posted by BigDon
For an impromptu or off-the-cuff presentation, blackboard or whiteboard is the way to go (I lean toward whiteboard). I also remember people trying to use an over-head projector and a clear plastic sheet for this, writing on the clear plastic sheet, and I never liked how that worked. I don't have enough experience with digital versions of this to have an opinion.
But for a planned, formal talk, Powerpoint or similar is the way to go. I've done talks for long enough, that I remember doing talks with slides - wow, was that a pain. If you didn't have the art and photo equipment, you had to use an outside lab to get the slides done (big bucks) and god forbid you had to change something. Then you'd go to a conference, either with a box of slides (that had to be transfered to a carousel and one or two always ended up backward or upside-down), or you had to bring them pre-loaded in your own carousel.
Now, I can just do the whole thing on my computer, make them as pretty as I like, stick the whole thing on a USB stick or e-mail it, and I'm good to go. Brilliant.
Powerpoint ain't much worse than most Microsoft products, and it is relatively easy to make a nice looking presentation. I do think some people go crazy with the special effects.
And ultimately, all of it is up to how good the speaker is. A good speaker can deal with any of it, and no technology will help a bad speaker learn to give a good talk.
Established Member
As an aside. I heard a theory once that dragging fingernails on a chalk board was the same sound made bye attacking apes, that is why it bothers people. Any truth in that or an urban myth?
Order of Kilopi
Mr. Swift
I've never seen a power point production in my entire life. Mainly going by the complaints of other people and this poem:
THE BALLAD OF THE POWER POINT RANGER
(sung to the tune of "The Green Beret")
Requests are made from day to day;
Briefings held and changes made.
Graphic slides, a must they say,
Power Point is the only way.
Computers crash and printers stall,
Overloading protocol.
Network's down and soldiers cry
Briefing's late, so heads will fly.
Pin Power Point slides upon my chest,
Full color slides, they look the best
100 slides were made that day
but only 10 made the final display.
Smiles upon the General's face
Slides were done, looked really great
Was up all night really working late,
Just to hear the General say ....
My soldier son, your slides were great,
Briefing's done, staff's up to date,
One problem son, you took too long,
So put in one more change, then go on home.
So tell my Mom I done my best,
Pin Power Point slides upon my chest
100 slides were made that day,
but only 10 made the final display.
Order of Kilopi
I wouldn't take a marketing gig at Microsoft for good money. The current companies are doing their best but there's no way to wash away the patina of "boring" stuck to the brand.So much for that Marketing job you wanted with Microsoft.
The words "polish" and "animal waste product" would come to mind, had not that phrase been disproven by the Mythbusters.
Order of Kilopi
Order of Kilopi
That's why I use polyethylene (I think) rope on my torsion engine. Nylon stretches too much and someone claimed PE has similar properties to sinew.
I will now hang my head in shame and admit that, in the past, due to the lack of any other drawing tools, I've actually designed catapults (to scale!) in PowerPoint. Not to mention portions of commercial airplanes.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt.
Forum Welcomer
Gotta agree with powerpoint for 'short' (10 minutes 10 an hour) presentations. I watch a lot of them, and produce very few. I am kind of a whiteboard geek, though. When I was teaching, I learned to love the whiteboard. A few years ago, I bought a 4'x8' sheet for home - the family calendar, as mentioned above, and the doors to the storage cabinet in the wood shop are whiteboard. I also helped my daughters each make and frame a roughly page sized board for doodling.
Order of Kilopi
Chalk, sometimes.
Dry-erase doesn't erase all that well if you leave it on for a while, which I tend to do. If it's a board that gets erased after use - such as a conference room - dry-erase would be my choice. But I wish I had a chalk board in my office. The white board I do have resembles some of the French cave-painting sites.
Forum Welcomer
My secret for cleaing whiteboards (learned after writing on my office board with a Sharpie...) plexiglass polish. I have some for my motorcycle windshield and visor. Wipe on, wipe off. Instant clean, really clean, clean :>
Order of Kilopi
I have some white-board cleaner, but it requires some serious elbow grease to get stuff off that's been there for months.
Forum Welcomer
Yup. I have some 'whiteboard cleaner, too. Didn't touch the Sharpie... leading to experimentation & finally the plexiglass polish
Order of Kilopi
At one of the schools in which I substitute teach, they had a particularly abused whiteboard (not so much sharpies as highlighters). They (who "they" were is uncertain) cleaned it with bleach, which removed some sort of coating. Dry erase markers used on this board became permanent, in that they could no longer be wiped off. Given the way public school budgets work (the superintendent needed his car detailed, or something), the solution was to remove the whiteboard, uncovering the blackboard.
Forum Welcomer
heh! Note that in the Navy (mid 80's) we were not allowed to refer to them as white or black boards... they were VAPs - Visual Aids Panels
Established Member
I will show her these replies when I see her tomorrow evening. She called those drawings "bubble rooms". Now, nine years later, she's still designing floor layouts and interior designs, but it is mostly digital.
I remember restaurants putting out the butcher paper and crayons for the kids here too.
The elementary school I attended had new rooms added one year, and the chalkboards in them were the most amazing thing for my 7 year old mind. There were several that could be rolled up or down, and they were green! The following year all the rooms had been renovated to the same colour board. But we still called them black boards.
Order of Kilopi
How about a semi-smart board.
A large monitor for the power point that has a surface that handles eraseable markers?
Moderator
Then you're not holding them right.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov
Moderation will be in purple.
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Moderator
Oh, it's both.
College of the Mainland opened a new building some years back. The front wall of each classroom was dry erase board, floor to ceiling, the full width of the room. The first week the rooms were in use, a lecturer filled the entire wall of one with his writings.
In non-ereaseable Magic Marker.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov
Moderation will be in purple.
Rules for Posting to This Board
Order of Kilopi
Powerpoint presentations are often boring because they are used in a boring way. It's great for graphics of data, like charts or photos or videos that get the point across quickly and easily. Unfortunately, many people use them for bullet points with text, which is more a distraction from what the person is saying. I'd say that writing on an overhead projector is more stimulating and interactive than reading computer text.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
I agree with all of that.
I've even seen people put full text under that bullet point and read from the powerpoint.
Order of Kilopi
Thirded.I agree with all of that.
I've even seen people put full text under that bullet point and read from the powerpoint.
There's only one thing worse than a presenter reading text from PP. It's a presenter paraphrasing the text from PP. If it says, "Average monthly figures for 2009," don't say, "This shows the mean of the figures for the months in 2009." I actually don't mind the presenter reading the text if it is as short as that. If it is longer, and needs to be read, it should be given to the audience members as handouts, or email.
If you're doing a presentation about an artist - say, Edward Hopper - PP is great. You can bring up his artwork to fill the screen, point out to the audience that there's not quite enough room for the car next to the petrol pumps, compare Night Owls [oops, should read Nighthawks] with a spoof from The Simpsons or a similar scene from a Film Noir, show maps and pictures of where he lived and so on.
Alternatively you could cram a vast amount of text about his life (with font so small that only the people in the front row can read it) and ask the audience to read it, or you could read it to them.
PP is a tool like any other - it's very useful if used for the correct purpose.
Last edited by Paul Beardsley; 2012-Apr-20 at 05:06 PM.
Established Member
Long ago, I'm sitting in on a lecture on some computer topic.
The instructor sketches out a diagram of a system on a dry-erase whiteboard, and talks about it.
Later, he adds a rectangle and puts the word MEMORY in it. But, he's picked up a different type of marker, evidently an indelible one.
Still later, when he erases the board to diagram a new thought, the dry-erase stuff goes away, but the MEMORY block stays there.
"Aha!" shouts some wise guy in the audience. "Non-volatile memory!"
He had to go and get some cleaning solution to restrore the board.
Order of Kilopi
True;
In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I was asked to do a demo for a historical presentation. The presenter had most of his presentation worded in powerpoint, but read his own text. It was painful because you didn't know when you could read along or not. For instance, there was a whole page of text under 3 bulletpoints on one slide. He should have left the bullets and got rid of the explaination.
But; the powerpoint was valuable because it showed illustrations and pictures among the text.
Which brings me to another point.
If you have a picture of something and want to explain it, then leave that picture up while explaining it. We don't need to see the text during the explaination. It's hard to visualize it during the explaination.
Order of Kilopi
"Nighthawks" One of my favorites. Mixed media is my favorite use of a projector for a lecture, instead of just powerpoint. Even putting the image of the speaker on the screen while he or she is talking seems better, or a camera on the whiteboard or blackboard they are using, when it's a large hall and people can't read the scribbles from the back.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
Argh, yes, my bad!
Order of Kilopi
This is so obvious, it should just happen. And yet it doesn't.
Administrator
Thus proving this:
Science News, 7 April 2012
Anyone who has ever tried to forget a bad night knows that erasing memory takes work. Physicists have now shown this is literally true, by measuring the heat released when a single bit of information is deleted.
The discovery confirms a 1961 prediction by IBM physicist Rolf Landauer. It links information and heat flow in ways that keep the universe from breaking the second law of thermodynamics. Elaborations on Landauer’s idea may also prove useful in building miniature computers that don’t overheat.
“Here you have two quantities which seem to have nothing to do with each other, at least at first sight, and Landauer tells you that they are interconnected,” says physicist Eric Lutz of the Free University Berlin. “That’s a big deal.”
Lutz and his colleagues, from the universities of Kaiserslautern and Augsburg in Germany and a research lab in Lyon, France, describe the findings in the March 8 Nature.
Order of Kilopi
I use the powerpoints I present to a) remind me what to lecture about b) give a hint about the important bits without saying "this is an important bit" and c) giving them some headings for their notes.
I've been at presentations where the speaker was reading (or had entirely memorized) the verbose text on the slide and not giving any additional information. My sentiment when that happens is "I just read all your slides; now tell me something I didn't already know." Usually, however, I'm neither imaginative nor brave enough to ask sufficiently snarky, annoying questions of the lector.
Order of Kilopi
When possible, I project my power point presentations onto the whiteboard. A big advantage to this is that I can write on my slides if I need to.
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