Friday, December 23, 2011

Steve Jobs on PowerPoint

To be posted in all classrooms:

“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

Steve Jobs, quoted in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
[A reasoned, nuanced evaluation? Hardly. For that, see Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. And yes, Jobs used a presentation app, Apple’s Keynote, for his keynotes.]

comments: 3

Anonymous said... said...

However, your link does lead us to at least one reasoned, nuanced evaluation:

"Velocity squared is like shipping and handling: it will get you every time."

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1
(End of fourth paragraph)

Anonymous said... said...

Further down the above webpage, there is cockle-warming GOLD:

"How to make engineers write concisely with sentences? By combining journalism with the technical report format. In a newspaper article, the paragraphs are ordered by importance, so that the reader can stop reading the article at whatever point they lose interest, knowing that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread.

"State your message in one sentence. That is your title. Write one paragraph justifying the message. That is your abstract. Circle each phrase in the abstract that needs clarification or more context. Write a paragraph or two for each such phrase. That is the body of your report. Identify each sentence in the body that needs clarification and write a paragraph or two in the appendix. Include your contact information for readers who require further detail."

-- William A. Wood (email), September 8, 2005

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1

Elaine said...

Every PowerPoint presentation I've been forced to attend has consisted of the screen projection followed by the 'speaker' reading the slide aloud to those of us in the audience who are not already reading the printed copies of the PowerPoint pages.... Deadly. The best thing about being retired might be the end of CEU's!