Timeline for Why do most people think it's a bad idea to read from slides?
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25 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 8, 2016 at 11:03 | comment | added | Aaron McDaid | If a picture speaks a thousand words, then remember to treat mathematical equations as pictures, not as words. | |
| Sep 7, 2016 at 17:51 | comment | added | Ben Voigt | @michael_timofeev: The quote from source #3 specifically addresses your suggestion by showing that "what the audience wants" is demonstrably inferior. | |
| Sep 7, 2016 at 17:50 | comment | added | Ben Voigt | @ff524: But your sources are (at least in these quotes) using the terms "sparse" and "redundant" as mutually-exclusive. In fact, "non-redundant" is specifically applied to what you have termed "sparse redundancy". See the problem? Also, your definition of multimedia (includes graphics) appears to differ from your sources, which include audio+text within the categorization of multimedia and not only audio+graphics or audio+graphics+text. | |
| Sep 7, 2016 at 15:51 | comment | added | ff524 | @Ben There's no contradiction. The first statement you mention says that the effect of redundancy is sometimes more positive in a presentation without graphics than one with, all else being equal. Neither the type of redundancy (verbatim or sparse) nor the control (comparing verbatim to sparse? verbatim redundancy to audio only? sparse redundancy to audio only?) is specified, hence the "may" - some redundancy may help in some of those but not necessarily in others. The other statements you mention specifically compare verbatim redundancy to sparse redundancy. | |
| Sep 7, 2016 at 15:30 | comment | added | Ben Voigt | Your conclusion/footnote Presentations that do not include graphics may benefit from redundant spoken-written text contradicts the source you quote: In comparison with verbatim, spoken–written presentations, presentations displaying key terms extracted from spoken narrations were associated with better learning outcomes And then the next quote also says that Sparse text performs better on objective metrics than text reproducing the speech verbatim. | |
| Sep 7, 2016 at 7:04 | comment | added | JDługosz | Let me add to that “when I can’t understand what the speaker is saying” having the specific word he’s trying to say on the slide makes it understandable! People who know they can't sound like a native should do that. | |
| Sep 7, 2016 at 2:18 | comment | added | michael_timofeev | How about asking what the audience wants and starting from that, rather than the usual selfish me me me attitude of speakers? All the research and statistic in the world won't make a difference if your audience doesn't want want you're giving them. Of course, I'm arguing against 80 upvotes. Is it any wonder that people hate going to a presentation and are bored to tears? | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 22:12 | comment | added | Raydot | I agree that you can expect some leeway from a generally academic audience. Even so, the old rule of "show don't tell" has been true since Aristotle wrote the Poetics. I've personally found speaking in metaphors lets you reach more audience members than speech alone. Not one thing to document that, but I'm pretty sure it's true. | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 18:34 | comment | added | Szabolcs | "Adding redundant on-screen text detracts from the learning processes highlighted in Figure 1 because it creates extraneous processing—such as inducing the learner to visually scan between the caption at the bottom of the screen and the graphic and to try to mentally reconcile the incoming spoken and verbal stream." ← This. I never read any studies on the topic but I was always convinced that this is true based on personal experience. | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 16:39 | comment | added | ff524 | @Yakk Do we have dozens or hundreds of studies probing the limits of this claim - see the meta-analysis cited in this answer. | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 15:10 | comment | added | Yakk | @guifa Except when watching some content, it is difficult to understand what the characters are saying in some scenes. With subtitles, you can reconstruct the damaged signal. I literally have to rewind some videos to catch what was said in a scene, while with subtitles I can glance down and quickly read the lines. The answer above cites 7 studies; what range of speech quality, subject difficulty, and listener expertise could possibly be covered by a mere 7 studies? Do we have dozens or hundreds of studies probing the limits of this claim, or is it based off a tiny set? | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 10:44 | comment | added | user0721090601 | One generally clear example to summarize: subtitled movies. If you watch a movie in a language you speak, having subtitles in the same or another language you speak can be immensely distracting. But if you watch sans subtitles, or use subtitles for a spoken language you don't understand, there's no much problem, despite only getting the information in a form you can understand once. | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 8:57 | comment | added | ff524 | @Najib to me, those are learning objectives. I want them to learn what the work is about and learn why it's interesting and important enough that they should follow up. Obviously I'm not going to test them afterwards :) but I still want the talk to be an effective learning experience. | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 8:51 | comment | added | ff524 | @Najib This is all research on facilitating the cognitive process of learning through multimedia presentation. When I give an academic talk, my goal is usually for the audience to learn something, and the purpose of my slides is to facilitate that learning. Someone with another goal (to entertain? to impress the audience with their graphic design skills? to put the audience into a bored stupor so they don't notice obvious problems with the work?) certainly might pursue another strategy. | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 7:36 | comment | added | Davidmh | This is a very nice answer, thank you! The guiding principle I use to decide sparsity in my slides is if someone gets lost, what do I need to get them back on the talk? | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 5:12 | history | edited | ff524 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 6, 2016 at 4:40 | history | edited | ff524 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 6, 2016 at 4:33 | history | edited | ff524 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 6, 2016 at 4:21 | comment | added | ff524 | @Lentes I'm not trying to convince you that the talk you attended was not effective - I wasn't there :) I'm just rounding out this answer to make it more useful for future readers. | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 4:17 | comment | added | Lentes | To your last edit: Thanks for your continued interest in this question. However, I am pretty sure that in my particular case it could not just be a matter of perception, especially relative to all the other "sparse-text narration talks" that I listened to in that conference, which I not only did not feel that I got at all (as often happens in areas outside of one's study in 30-min presentations), but also in fact could not possibly have understood better than this talk, since for most of them I would give up at most halfway through them. | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 4:02 | history | edited | ff524 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 6, 2016 at 3:53 | comment | added | Lentes | If there is no difference for post-secondary educational level then that's something I'm interested to see. I'll do so later, as I'm not really in the mood to sort through that research right now, and still what I said may apply. But, I suppose I need to be careful about extrapolating information from that one great experience I had with a slide-reader talk; I'll certainly have to listen to (or read?) more of these talks to see if there is more to it than just sheer luck. Anyway, thanks for sharing the research. | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 3:34 | comment | added | Lentes | Thank you for your documented answer. I find the research you cited unsatisfactory for academic-level talks, because the audience of (STEM) academics is not a random sample from the population (for instance, many are non-native English speakers, many probably have much stronger reading and writing skills than listening and speaking skills). In any case, your last cited paragraph seems to imply that verbatim spoken-written presentations are "better" than spoken-only presentations in a situation that would often arise in say a mathematics talk (e.g. no pictures), which makes sense to me. | |
| Sep 6, 2016 at 2:51 | history | edited | ff524 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 6, 2016 at 2:44 | history | answered | ff524 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |