Michael Alley has taught at Virginia Tech, the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Barcelona. His book, The Craft of Scientific Presentations, is a significant contribution to the scientific community. While Michael Alley’s experiments have demonstrated that using sentence headlines and pictures on PowerPoint slides (instead of phrase headlines and bullet points) improves knowledge transfer, other researchers have not been able to duplicate those results.
Perhaps this is because Alley’s experiments are conducted with live speakers in front of live audiences. Blokzijl and Andeweg have examined the effect of various slide designs in an e-learning environment on both the students’ perceptions of PowerPoint presentations and the degree to which those designs support knowledge transfer.
Not surprisingly, their findings are different. The authors found that while students in an e-learning environment have a distinct preference for slides with visual support, the text only slides resulted in higher test scores.
The authors go on to express their doubts that the results of any controlled e-learning experiments can be directly applied to live presentations due to a number of real-life complicating factors, such as the speaker’s oral delivery, eye contact, and the presence of an audience.
I suspect that our comrades, Blokzijl and Andeweg, are trying to design a perfect PowerPoint presentation that does not require a presenter. Not sure that’s possible. It’s kind of like writing a piece of music that doesn’t require a musician.
I have seen a good presenter overcome bad slides many times. By being highly directive, telling the audience what to look at and what not to look at; by introducing the next slide before leaving the current one, so that the audience is prepared for the next chunk of information; and by engaging the audience in discussion about the items on the screen, I have seen speakers turn a pig pen of PowerPoint into a silky smooth presentation.
The question is, can good slides overcome a bad presenter? I don’t know, but I’ve got my doubts.
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