Saturday, November 11, 2006

10-20-30 rule

The 20 and 30 part of the rule is excellent. I'm not sure I agree with the 10 slide only part. In 20 minutes, 10 slides might get tiresome to the viewer. It would seem that when the presentation is moving along, and the speaker is talking and not reading the slides, more slides could be effective.

2 comments:

Marcus D. Childress said...

PowerPoint is evil. Don't be persuaded by its trickery! :)

Dusti Howell said...

I recently gave a 10 minute slideshow that was over 50 slides long. There was a 10 minute limit to the presentation and my goal was to cover a lot of ground. Adding lots of visuals was my way to do that. However there are pros and cons to this 'shotgun' approach.

The pros are that this approach can be very entertaining. I got a lot of accolades for the presentation especially from kids - even though this was addressed to adults. No one fell asleep. Emotionally, this presentation impacted everyone on some level. Everyone left with a smile and a new feeling for the content covered.

The cons begin with the fact that there is no room for reflection. Taking notes from this type of presentation is difficult. Therefore, how much of the information in this presentation was retained?

My guess is that on a macro level, emotionally everyone left with a new awareness for the topic that was delivered. However, at the micro level, most if not all of the details were forgotten. If I am correct, then the 'shotgun' approach might be great for introducing a new topic that will be followed up on later. It would likely not be recommended for traditional learning scenarios.