Ben Turpin & Charlie Chaplin

Movies are primarily a visual medium. In fact, film survived for many years as silent features without any sound at all (another testament to the dominance of the visual centers of our brain). Later, a piano accompanied the movie, then soundtracks, and eventually synchronized dialogue in the late 1920s. Music and sound were essential to communicating the atmosphere of a scene and influencing the emotions of the audience.

Presentations have an inverse relationship to movies. The lecture is primarily an oral medium of communication. Slides should serve as a “visual soundtrack” to the presenter.

A teacher who is prepared should be able to give a lecture without relying on slides, just as old silent movies were able to stand on their own. Indeed, a gifted teacher doesn’t rely on notes or any sort of script, but teaches according to the preparation of the student. Of course, in today’s academic world, preselected principles must be taught within a given timeframe, so how can the idea of a visual-track aid in preparing lecture slides?

Visual Cues – Composers use musical cues to prepare the audience for what is happening on the screen – a sharp, dissonant forte from the strings when Jaws attacks from the water; a light legato during a romantic scene; or a triumphant crescendo during the climax of the movie. Your slides can be visual cues for your students to help them know what is coming next. You might show a fullscreen image of body builders before detailing actin and myosin, the molecular components of muscle fibers, for example. Or use an image of a juicy, charbroiled cheeseburger when you discuss the principle of caloric intake in your nutrition course. Also, changing the design theme is one way to signal when you are moving on to the next chapter.

Emotion – The music in a movie greatly enhances how the audience feels about the characters and story. Choosing images that evoke emotion – a crying baby or laughing teenager, for instance – can aid in your students’ retention. According to Dr. Medina in Brain Rules, “Emotionally charged events persist much longer in our memories and are recalled with greater accuracy than neutral memories.” This is one reason bullet points are so ineffective – nobody cares about lists! Instead of listing the masterpieces you’ll discuss in Art History, begin with a clip from The DaVinci Code which introduces the paintings and the meaning behind them. Give students a reason to care!

Template – The slide design you choose for individual slides can say a lot about the content. A Title Slide has centered text in a large font, suggesting this is the beginning of a new, important topic. Differentiating itself as a subtopic, another slide may have a smaller title at the top with space for text or images below it. You shouldn’t always use the built in templates, but keep title slides consistent with each other by using the same font size and text placement.

Transitions – Just as musical scores offer both subtle and dramatic effects, the transitions you choose can help your students know when you’re moving on to another topic. Simple transitions such as Dissolve or Fade are barely noticeable and help the students stay focused on the content. More elaborate slide transitions, such as Doorway, Grid, or other 3D effects make it clear to your students that something is changing. While these transitions can be distracting and should be used very sparingly, they can help emphasize to your students that you are ending one discussion and moving onto a new topic.

I could go on and on with the analogy of using a visual soundtrack to prepare your slides. I’m sure future posts will carry on with these ideas. Think of your slides as a simple visual complement to your teaching. Get creative. This will aid your students in keeping pace with the lecture and in recognizing the context of the material.

Two great examples of slideuments are 8 Keys to Effective Lecture by Terry Doyle at Ferris State University, or How Do I Use PowerPoint to Teach by Patrick Crispen (links are direct downloads to the PowerPoint files).

While the content in both of these presentations is valuable, presenting it in slide form does not make sense, since they were dense with text, did not use many visuals, and flowed much more like an essay.

On the other hand, Kashi’s Yearbook celebrating 25 years was designed as a document but presented as slides… docuslides?? With this practice becoming common with online services such as SlideRocket and Slideshare, maybe it’s time to coin a new term to use in conjunction with slideument.

Docuslides. I like it.

What do you think?

Dr. Marian Diamond, U.C. Berkley

During my semester studying anatomy for my undergraduate degree, I began downloading podcasts via iTunes U to supplement my own lecture experiences. I came across an anatomy course taught at UC Berkeley by the wonderful Prof. Marian Diamond. While listening to the first lecture in the series, I was extremely impressed with her calm and authoritative demeanor. All at once she exudes confidence and respect toward her students. After a short pause during the lecture to erase the chalkboard, she said, “I have to tell you why I don’t use PowerPoint.” I was overcome with excitement and anticipation as I waited to hear why this capable teacher purposefully abstained from using a popular technological tool. What followed was a brief yet powerful statement that every teacher who uses lecture slides should consider. I include it here verbatim:

“I have to tell you why I still use chalkboard and do not use PowerPoint. Because I’ve studied learning mechanisms long enough to know that it takes time to take in the primary information and associate it. I feel if I just flash on things like this you don’t get it. If you write, you use your kinesthetic sense. That’s one way. It slows me down, it slows you down. And I also repeat all the time, because we know repeating reinforces. First time through you have an ionic exchange, second time through you have protein synthesis. So we’re using things that have been shown for learning rather than just keeping up with the technology.“

Here is an audio clip so you can hear it yourself. Or you can download the full lecture audio from iTunes U.

I was thrilled with her explanation! It wasn’t because she couldn’t use PowerPoint, found it too cumbersome, or time consuming. It was simply that there was no pedagogical reason to use it. As far as learning is concerned, using the chalk board and encouraging the students to take notes is far more effective than flashing something up on the screen.

After further investigation, it seems as though Professor Diamond makes a similar statement at the beginning of every semester (see Fall 2007 and Fall 2008). This suggests that it wasn’t just a passing thought in casual conversation, but that it is important enough for her students to understand the deliberate choice she made to improve their education.

Now, I am not saying definitively that you shouldn’t use PowerPoint. But if you do, there had better be a darn good reason. Don’t use it just because it’s easier or because you want to look cool using ‘up to date technology.’ And further more, if you do use PowerPoint, you’d better make them darn good slides. That’s what this blog is all about, so be sure to read some other posts. You might like to start with 2 Design Changes That Follow All Brain Rules, since we are talking about neuroscience here.

This coincides nicely with the Brain Rule on Attention – “We don’t pay attention to boring things.” Our brains can only pay attention to one thing at a time, and it usually chooses to pay attention to the thing that is more interesting. I think you can agree that anything is more interesting than a blank, black screen.

A blank slide like this one can pull students' attention away from the slides to focus on you.

A simple trick in PowerPoint or Keynote can help refocus your students’ attention on you – turning off the slides. Yep, that’s it. If you want students to pay attention to YOU, force them to stop paying attention to YOUR SLIDES, just by turning them off. This doesn’t mean you have to exit the program or shut down the projector, though. Here are 2 quick and easy ways to blank the screen during your lecture.

The ‘B’ Key

In both PowerPoint and Keynote, pressing the ‘B’ key on your keyboard will make the screen go black. (Alternatively, the ‘W’ key in either application makes the screen completely white.) To return to your slides, press any key. Many presenter remotes (such as the Targus Presentation Remote) have a dedicated button to blank the screen, allowing you to blank the screen without having to be stuck at your computer behind the lectern.

Insert Black Slide

If you are preparing a lecture ahead of time and anticipate a moment that requires the students’ attention, insert a blank, black slide. (To be clear, any layout will appear blank when presented, unless you have inserted text or other objects onto the slide. I prefer to explicitly choose the Blank layout to avoid any confusion while creating the slide deck.)

To do this in Keynote:

1. Insert a new slide.
2. Change the Slide Layout to Blank Slide.
3. Change the Theme to Black.

To do this in PowerPoint:

1. Insert a new slide.
2. Change the Slide Layout to Blank
3. Change the Slide Background to Black and be sure ‘Hide Background Graphics’ is checked.

Kashi designed a beautiful document, but confusingly presented it as a slideshow

I received a monthly e-mail newsletter from SlideRocket, an online presentation service. Featured under their Presentation Showcase was a SlideRocket presentation created by Kashi, the San Diego based whole foods company. I clicked on the link and was taken to a beautifully designed, visually appealing presentation… I mean document. No, they were definitely slides… but, they’re in portrait orientation… wait a minute!!  (You can view the presentation here.)

I was greatly confused. I liked what I was seeing, but felt weird clicking through slides that looked like 8.5×11″ pages. I quickly realized that I was looking at the ultimate incarnation of what Presentation Zen‘s Garr Reynolds calls a “slideument.” As Garr explains,

“Slides are slides. Documents are documents. They aren’t the same thing. Attempts to merge them result in what I call the ‘slideument’ (slide + document = slideument).”

Slideuments are a symptom of ignorance and, to a degree, laziness. Conference organizers tend to require their speakers to submit their presentation slides to be used as handouts or to otherwise be distributed to attendees. More and more, college professors distribute their lecture slides to their students as a form of notes – all but obliterating the need for students to pay attention in class and take notes. This creates a design dilemma, because well designed slides do not function well as a document. What these organizers and professors don’t understand is that the purpose of slides is completely different from the purpose of a document. Paraphrasing from Edward Tufte, slides have a low density of information while documents have a high density of information. In other words, slides are a visual supplement to the main medium of information (the lecturer) while documents are the main medium of information. Instead of combining the two into a slideument, they should be creating two separate versions of the document – one for reading, the other for presenting.

Kashi’s Yearbook celebrating their “25 Years of Passion for Positive Eating” was an incredibly well designed document full of great information divided into 7 sections. It was information dense. Presenting it page by page in a slideshow, however, added no functionality. If anything, it lessened the effectiveness of the document by constraining the viewable size of the document and forcing the reader to move in a linear fashion. If the document had also been redesigned specifically to be presented as slides, it would have been much more effective.

In an upcoming post, I will present some solutions to the slideument conundrum. I will share examples of how to fill the needs of conference organizers and teachers by utilizing notes and/or creating two documents.

Update: After some more consideration, and comments from readers, I’ve written a follow up post clarifying the problems with this presentation and suggesting a new term for the Kashi dilemma – docuslides.