the slides will be in our corporate colors: yellow text on a pink background …
And the presenter will regularly quiz attendees on the content
Not quiz as such. More like “any questions so far?” at the end of each slide, but will not give you time to ask anything “no? Ok, moving on”
Or the awkward 5 minutes of silence when no one has a question at all.
Add to that going back 2-3 slides every 5mins and you get my professor at uni. Watching his classes was actual torture
One of my teachers at uni used a Word document instead of a presentation. And yes, he still read it word for word. It was like a very shitty audiobook
At university, I had a lecturer who took this one step further. Instead of a power point, he used a word document that he read word by word.
legere (lat) to read => lectura (lat) the reading event => lecture (en) => lecturer (en) a person giving/hosting a reading event.
A lecturer is supposed to read the text of a book to students so that they are able to write it down and obtain a copy of it for themselves.
Books written by professional scribes are incredible expensive, and this new thing they established in Bologna in 1088 – the so called “universities” offering lectures will be a major breakthrough in the history of mankind to distribute knowledge!
Good to know some professors still honour the only true way of teaching.
Pfff this generation is wasting good expensive sheets of paper when good old oral tradition has worked for thousands of years. Writing was invented only 4000 years ago and still haven’t caught on.
It really baffles me when people make presentations like this. It’s such an easy thing to correct as well but it just keeps happening.
I’ll never forget the one professor who put up a side of code… And had no idea what the class was about. We spent most of the class reading together with him to try to figure out what the lesson was supposed to be about
Apparently the guy was one of those crazy low-level guys who can do things I don’t understand but build on top of. Guy just constantly looked bewildered by reality, he belonged in the code world
So what was the lesson supposed to be about?
Semaphores. It was obviously C++ code with a bunch of threads, but as it was a standalone C++ program it wasn’t really clear why it was lol
By low level guys, you mean he knew about circuits and EE? But he got stuck teaching a C++ class but he couldn’t code?
By low level, I mean like kernel work. I’m told he worked on one of the 'nixes way back when.
It was a data structures class, we did Java or Python in the into classes, php & js for Web + db basics and C++ for theory classes. Then you pick your path
Anyways, the guy taught OS, language design, and data structures. He could code fine, he was just a terrible lecturer - extremely disorganized, no lesson plans. He only wasted the one full class forgetting why we were there, but reading his code (labeled by week) then scribbling on the whiteboard was his lecture
I guess I ended up understanding data structures and I never fell asleep, so maybe he wasn’t a bad teacher. It was just mostly just assignments, he didn’t really do quizzes and the final wasn’t much of the grade
Why data structures weren’t in C/C++? It would make sense to care about structures, cache locality, SoA/AoS, indirections and stuff in some language that compiles in native code.
Ah, I phrased that ambiguously - it was in C++, all of our computing theory type classes were.
I just got distracted realizing I graduated proficient in 9 languages and reasonably comfortable in another 3. 2 were from internships, but the rest were all from coursework. The last couple years, I was juggling 2-4 at all times, plus the odd scripts
I always thought I was really good at picking up and switching languages, but I just realized my program was designed that way.
That feels like a lot, do other colleges do something similar?
(I guess you could knock off 3 because we ended up switching every semester in software engineering because cross platform apps were pretty bad at the time)
“sometimes it’s okay to skip class”
It’s even more fun when your manager makes you do a presentation. And he schedules it at 10pm, so that all the people 12 timezones away can attend at their “morning time.”
But they don’t even bother to join the zoom. The only people attending are also in your timezone up way later than they want to be. And he’s like “it’s ok, we’ll record it for them.” Like wtf.
And then they go and do stupidass incorrect shit anyway, whether they watched the recording or not.
stupidass incorrect shit
like scheduling a meeting at 10pm
My best presentation at university was during a small seminar. It was a 45min talk about 3 papers and how they relate to each other. I procrastinate a lot, so I didn’t really do anything besides reading those papers until the day before my presentation. That day, a friend called for a spontaneous barbecue, so I had just an odd hour to actually prepare slides. I managed 8 slides in total, the rest I just impromptu recalled from memory. People liked it and it was the least effort I put in any talk I held at university.
reading those papers
Woah there Mr. Overachiever, you’re making the rest of us look lazy…
Honestly, that’s the right way to do it if you really know your stuff.
The slides are there as a visual aid or backdrop. The “presenter notes” is where all your bulleted items and prompts for recollection go.
Also, and this is where a lot of people get it wrong, the slide deck is NOT a useful document for distribution. It is specific to both the subject matter and speaker; it’s analogous to sheet music. A video of the presentation (e.g. TED) is far more useful as we’re really talking about a performance. At worst, there should be “references” page in some appendix, with hyperlinks to actual media that folks can digest on their own time.
Even if I’m only presenting a handful of slides I’ll slap some blank ones on the end just to make everyone sweat over “Slide 1 of 83”. Everyone is pretty darn quiet and glad to help speed things along most of the time.
Do you give presentations to people on whom this works more than once?
Ya got to mix it up, sometimes you really do have an 83 page slide deck.
Death by a hundred slides.
Here is my opinion: Slide should have images, diagrams or charts to illustrate what I say, almost never any text. What I say is written in advance in the notes of the presentation that is only visible to me while presenting, but will be readable by anyone who look at the file afterwards. I prepare the duration and delivery of the speech at least three times in full before presenting.
This person points that power
I hate this. It’s basically just a lecture with slides as the cue cards, which the audience can read for themselves.
It’s like having subtitles in real life.
Ugh. Give me some data, graphs, or pictures of cats to look at for the slideshow or something. Something other than what you’re saying. If you add nothing to what we’re seeing, then… I have eyes. I don’t need you to read it for me.
PowerPoint, at least, has a notes section and a presenter view, so you can hook your computer up with the projector or TV or whatever as a second monitor and PowerPoint can be set up to use the TV/projector/whatever, as the slide show, and give you a presenter view on your screen which shows the current slide, and all your notes.
So if you can’t get relevant pictures, at least put up something interesting to look at, and leave the cue cards notes in the notes section, so the audience doesn’t have to stare at the exact words you’re saying, as you’re saying them, because I guarantee you that if you do, I’ll be judging you on your spelling and grammar.
People who aren’t good at presentation making think that they are supposed to convey absolutely everything they are saying and be crammed full of information. I was doing a group presentation sometime ago where my group members insisted I put paragraphs of info in my slides and were worried we would fail for not enough information. Even after explaining that they were meant to guide the audience in what I was going to say, they insisted that it was wrong
CDR time!
(except I’ve had CDRs that were scheduled for a full work week, 40 hours)
What is this CDR you speak of? Like blank CDs?
Canada’s Drag Race? Corel DRaw? Climate Data Record? Carbon Dioxide Removal??
Man, Carbon Dioxide Removal for a full week…
Critical Design Review?
That’s the one I’m familiar with. But the slides themselves are super useful a few years later when you can’t remember what in the world you were thinking.
The comic strip sounds like someone made a plugin to export obsidian vaults to .pptx
This comic strip sounds like a 20 year-old Dilbert comic with all the wit removed.
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