I’ll be speaking at Mix06 in Las Vegas this Monday — I’m giving a developer-focused overview of WPF (4:30 on Monday, if you’re interested).
One of the original goals (gimmicks?) for my talk was to not use Powerpoint — I didn’t want my talk to turn into a boring, slide-focused hour. I hoped that not having Powerpoint would force me to come up with a gripping, unique talk that would win many awards, honors, an Oscar, presidential medal of honor, and possibly a pony.
Well, after working on the talk for a few weeks, I’m removing this goal for a couple of reasons:
- Just like the PDC talks, the sessions at Mix will be recorded and archived on video. However, the chaptering is integrated with Powerpoint. Without slides, there will be no chaptering in my talk, making it very hard to scan later on.
- It’s silly. Plenty of great talks have been given with Powerpoint — and plenty of horrible talks have been given without it. Content, flow, and the speaker are what make or break a talk, not the file format.
Alternatively:
Don’t worry — I don’t think that slide will make the cut.
6 Comments
“I hoped that not having Powerpoint would force me to come up with a gripping, unique talk that would win many awards, honors, an Oscar, presidential medal of honor, and possibly a pony.”
I think you should still strive for that pony. ;)
Do you know when the Mix06 videos will be published? Sadly I wasn’t lucky enough to get to go, so I’m gonna have to enjoy from the comfort of my office.
Erik: No clue about the video — I’ll post a link as soon as it’s up though. PDC took about a month and a half.
Great, thanks. :)
It’s too bad they don’t broadcast these live.
Maybe you can blast everyone away with a newstyle presentation. Take a look at presentation Zen or the very nice presentation from Andy Budd.
You can find it at:
http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/03/clear_visuals_w.html
http://www.andybudd.com/
(I couldn’t figure out if i could use hrefs in this comment, maybe nice to hint that to the users)
Mark: I’m a fan of presentation zen (if you saw my PDC talk — I love using non-verbose slides) …
Most of my talk will be demos and code — so even if they slides don’t blow people away, hopefully the code & demos will :)
Reminds me of this (classic): http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/