Guidelines for Preparing Presentations

You all will be doing most of the teaching in this course; each of us will play both teacher and student roles. For this to work effectively, we must prepare presentations thoughtfully, carefully, and with sufficient lead time, keeping the following points in mind.

Online versions of presentations

Goals

Your talk should describe the basic physics of the issue or technology; historical usage and trends, where appropriate; and the advantages and disadvantages for various stakeholders (industry, public, environment)
It should point the class to further inquiries
It should engage the class and seek to involve them in discussion, either as an entire class or in small groups, for about 30% of the class period.

How to Prepare Slides

First some general guidelines on preparing interesting and effective slides for your presentation:

Sparse > busy — too much information on a slide is tiresome and distracting. It is better to err on the side of simplicity
Graphics > text — a picture is worth 1000 words. In some cases it is important to quote verbatim on a slide; usually it is preferable to speak the words and show the pictures
Avoid small fonts — try projecting your base slide and viewing it from the back of the room. Is the text large enough? Does the background or the color of the text make it difficult to read? Is that color decidedly different from its appearance on your screen? Note that I will provide a Macintosh equiped with Keynote, PowerPoint, and Acrobat Reader 7. If you prepare your talk with PowerPoint, avoid nonstandard fonts to avoid unpleasant surprises!
References — Make sure to indicate the sources of your graphics, data, and other content, whether they be URLs or traditional.
Label graphs — Graphs and plots should be clearly labeled in a legible font. Certain programs (Matlab, GNUplot) use by default a very small font size. Override it!
Clean and simple > complicated
Color, backgrounds, fancy fonts — it is tempting to some of us to spend lots of time on these, but try to keep such efforts modest. Random bright colorful text can diminish effectiveness — I have wasted time in presentations trying to figure out the meaning of a presenter's color scheme, ultimately deciding that is was random. Bottomline: be consistent.

Bringing the Presentation

There are two USB flash drives for the course. These use the DOS FAT16 format, which is readable by PCs and Macs. No driver is required for Macs, or for Windows Me, 2000, or XP. Users of Windows 98SE need to install a driver from the Memorex website and select the driver for your flavor of Windows98.

Two Beasts to Avoid: Cow and Bull

Let me start by describing two unsuccessful strategies. We all know what B.S. is: a litany of unsubstantiated opinions and conjectures, often of dubious validity. Some topics inspire great passion and enthusiasm, leading one to form deeply held opinions. Indeed, I hope that we all find many such topics in this course. However, even a very enthusiastic presentation of your deep-seated convictions will not be as informative, or ultimately as persuasive, as it could be when supported with appropriate neutral (factual) information. Avoid the bull!

Perhaps less familiar is cow. Cow is the opposite of bull: a litany of disconnected facts and data. Cow is often less informative and almost always less engaging than bull. You can spot cow presentations by their great number of slides, and by the modest time spent on each slide. I once attended a presentation at a Gordon conference in which the speaker slapped transparencies showing graphical data on different types of glass at the rate of about 3 per minute. Rest assured that about the only thing communicated was boredom.

People need time to absorb the information on a slide, whether it involves graphics, text, or both. Remind yourself that your audience is seeing the slide for the first time. Help us get oriented to the visual information, but with your oral presentation supplement the visual information. A presentation in which the speaker reads the text of PowerPoint slides is deathly!

Pace

It can be tough to get the pacing of a presentation right; too fast and people quickly get lost and tune out; too slow and they get bored. Watch the audience and listen to yourself speak. Many of us speak faster when we're nervous. Take a deep breath from time to time and watch the audience for signs that they are following. Drop in a question from time to time.