The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

From: Marc Aniballi <marcaniballi () hotmail com>

Even Microsoft suffers from this - when I worked for them, we had
bi-annual meetings that lasted a week and were filled with dawn 'til
dusk presentations (PowerPoint of course). Internally we referred to it
as the bi-annual sentence to Death by PowerPoint. The case is ever true
though, it was just as bad before powerpoint, when you had overheads
(poor quality much of the time) and some presenter with a magic marker.

The issue I find is that there are very few people who know how to
CREATE a presentation. Most are reduced to copying a template
presentation from some old corporate archive and changing the bullet
points to suit their requirements. Then, if that isn't bad enough, they
haven't been trained in how to PRESENT a presentation, and so they
inevitably get on stage and read the slides to everybody. If the content
hasn't already put the audience to sleep, the presumption that they
don't know how to read will surely have them out the door in spirit, if
not in reality.

There is a reason why arts majors are necessary in a society - they have
studied how to capture human attention! Engineers rarely have a clue in
this area and are quite comfortable with the fact.

Regards,


Marc Aniballi 

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