PPT… the powerful point

I always considered PPT as a tool.  It is so powerful that we ask people to do power point by which we mean they should make presentation. Tool became the verb!.  I have mastered the art of ppt and was adept in using its several features like animations, motion paths, hyperlinks, inserting control/navigational buttons etc and finally found out that a black board (now a days everything is white) and a piece of chalk (read white board marker pen) is the most powerful tool to express yourself.  Once, I went to deliver a guest lecture in a small time management school.  When my office asked me to do that job I prepared a very elaborate and technically superior ppt so as to impress the students thinking that they being management students will give me accolades.  When I went there, I learnt that they do not have the projector and still operating the overhead projector for projecting the transparencies!  I almost collapsed out of surprise for their respect for tradition (if old things can be dubbed so) and disappointment for not able to entice the students with my PPTability.  Poor course coordinator offered to convert my ppt into transparencies which I declined out of vengeance and frustration.  I went on with green board (neither black nor white … something like intermediate technology). 

I remembered all this yesterday when I read article  by Ravi Subramanian in ET (13 Sept 2010) titled:

Death By PowerPoint: Beware of a presentation-dominated culture. 

I cannot agree more with the author and he echoed some of the feelings I often expressed to my colleagues.  I my office I have seen people copasting (copy pasting) long passages in a single slide with letters that appear smaller than ants to a person with 100/6 vision sitting 6 ft away. Their duty is to make ppt and not to communicate.  Tool is mistaken for the message. Similarly, scores of slides packed for a 15 minutes slot.  When I chaired a session in a conference last year, I found it really difficult and painful to ration time to people who came with unending ppt for 10 minutes slot.  And each slide packs volumes of information cluttered around. Ideally one should have minimum number of slides with each slide carrying a few lines or still better a few communicative drawings/pictures.  If presenting in a conference/seminar, better to highlight results in first 3 - 4 slides and keep the latter slides for explaining the methods, etc. and keep a few reserve slides for answering possible supplementaries.  Ultimately, our motto should not be communication or no communication, ppt zindabad.  But, ppt or no ppt, I should communicate effectively.  This reminds me of my teacher Shri Nagabhushanam who taught Botany  in our 9th standard in High School at Ichchhapuram. He explained us the cross section of a leaf without getting up from his chair and we all could visualise how the CS looked without seeing any diagram/picture. 

The strength of your project lies not in the ppt, but in its content. I recently heard that the shortest ppt a person presented in  a seminar has only a single slide! Wow!

Reverse Murphy Law & Long blog(hol)iday

I am thankful to the visitors of this blog of mine. I feel guilty that I did not post any new topics thesedays - I enjoyed a long blog holiday- especially when I see the site meter stats which show that people are regulary visiting this blog - at least 5-6 on any day. Perhaps people are visiting to see any updates - I feel awckward for disappointing them. Of course the holiday is only for this and not to my telugu blog, notwithstanding the intermittant gaps there too.
One reason for the gap in this blog is the very fact that i did not come across with any material that I can post here. It is because I am not reading anything on these topics thesdays . .. :))).

Reverse Murphy Law or Satyasai' Law :))

In the previous post I wrote about Murphy's Law. Recently I experienced reverse of it. In nutshell, Murphy's Law says that when things can go wrong they go wrong. We experienced that Things, even when left to go wrong, may still go right.' The incident that prompted me to is like this.

My daughter did a project for her school as part of a team. On the day of the exhibition, she was not to go to school as she was not in the core team which need to explain the things to visitors. Her friend's status is the same. But both of them needed to send the charts prepared by them individually to school on the exhibition day so that the core team can arrange and open for public view. My daughter was to send the chart through my son who is in the same school and whose attendance was compulsory. When the friend called my daughter about the arrangements to send the charts to the core team, my daughter asked her to send it across to my son and never bothered to enquire about the person through who she would send and in which school bus she commutes.

Next day my son developed fever and could not attend the school. Not knowing the arrangements we did not wake up my daughter too. My dauhter got up started panicking as to what to do. I volunteered to take her to school. We went to school clueless as to where to search for who. My son's classmates we met at the venue of the exhibition were clue less too about anyone holding a chart coming in search of my son. We wandered here and there and thought of going to wait at my son's class room in another block. On the way we found a few students of my son's class coming and my daughter went and checked the red coloured chart in a girl's hand and found it to be the one her friend sent. On inquiry we found that the girl carrying the chart received from another boy who was asked by his teacher to carry it and keep in the room where my son's class students were displaying their exhibits.

In the whole process, my daughter did not plan for the contingencies and never took care to have right information . Ironically, we could not contact her friend too on her mobile on which we frenetically tried for over an hour. We have all conditions for ending up in failure to deliver the chart (which was very important and the first introductory chart to be displayed). Had we missed the students who were carrying it to the venue (which could have happened very easily) the chart would have landed in a 'blackhole'.

Murphy's Law operates when we take care of all possibilities of failure and still we may get a setback from unknown corner. Here, in our case, in contrast, we never took care of any possibility of failure and had ideal conditions for a set back.

Here is the Satyasai's Reverse Murphy's Law is at work.