Zooming in on the Defects of PowerPoint
Zooming in on the Defects of PowerPoint
I’ve just finished several days of staring, hour after hour, at the year’s economics meetings via Zoom. What really struck me, beyond the content of the talks, was the way Zoom exacerbates “death by bullet point”.
PowerPoint’s capabilities encourage speakers to load up their slides with lots of text and graphics, which then leads the audience to glue their eyeballs to the slides and not the speaker. This defeats the core purpose of public speaking in the post-Gutenberg era, which is to use the audience’s engagement with the speaker as a vehicle for communicating thoughts and feelings that the written word, even accompanied by pictures, can’t express. The worst scenario, which all of us have experienced way too often, is when a speaker crams lots of text in tiny fonts into each slide and then reads it word for word.
As a teacher, I deliberately tried to upend this tendency without abandoning PowerPoint altogether. I constructed very simple slides with as little text as possible, using very large fonts and relying on spatial organization, like lists and things pointing to other things with arrows to give listeners a sense of the ongoing structure of my presentation. Sometimes I would insert charts or tables, but usually with only two or three headline quantities or relationships, easily seen in a brief glimpse. I wanted students’ attention to be focused on me, not my slides.
A few of the speakers I saw this week had the same strategy, but it was defeated by Zoom. The standard Zoom screen gives you a tiny speaker window next to a massive space for slides; the main effect of PowerPoint minimalism was to produce a screenful of whitespace. You could barely see the speaker even if you wanted to.
Why isn’t the ratio of screen space devoted to slides versus speaker image customizable?
Seemingly the only real solution (other than a different platform than Zoom of course), requires considerable tech savvy on the part of the presenter. You can set up clever virtual webcam feeds to feed in to zoom and use a tool like OBS (broadcast software commonly used by Twitch broadcasters) to composite a video feed yourself, adjusting the ratio of slides to your own presenter view as desired. Some simple graphics work can frame things up nicely. This gets fed to Zoom as if it were the webcam.
Unfortunately this approach isn’t exactly amenable unless your pretty interested in A/V work and experimentation. I will be doing something similar for teaching some lectures this upcoming semester, which will also include automated subtitles.
… what Dan said.
OBS lets you composite between multiple sources, like cameras, and powerpoint windows, and deliver the result to Zoom as a virtual camera.
It could provide a way to improve on the “share screen” handoff in collaborative meetings, in that each participant could make their camera a virtual screen and share a mix of their headshot & content as well. — Imagine screenshotting a slide, highlighting a datapoint, and sharing it as their video feed to the meeting.
Or in a colloborative exercise, each student could share their Python Notebook Window dynamically as their video feed rather than a black box with a nickname.
When I did presentations to corporate customers, I never showed a full sheet of bullet pointed statements. It was too easy for them to read and get ahead of me. so why even do a presentation? Just mail it to them and have them call you if there are any questions. Easy enough for a $300/hour manufacturing consultant.
The presentation was made so parts of it could be revealed and I or others would speak to each bullet point having the audience focus on us and not 100% the presentation. Picture and diagrams help (pictorial hidden factory explanations are an example of what needs explanation during a larger factory process).