Slides And Teacher Talkers

The focus in the household today eventually turned to our PowerPoint slides for the Project Management Computer Science guest lectures that Vicki and I are doing a week from tomorrow night. My lovely wife, who always takes such things so very seriously, has been slaving away over hers for several hours a day, going back a few weeks now. She's re-written them substantially several times, always ending up with a better version than she had previously. The content was already pretty well set before we went at it this afternoon, but today's goal was to get the flow just right. For those who maybe don't do many presentations (or who are so good at it that it just comes naturally and so they don't have to work so hard at it), it's critical that the slides mimic (or better yet, enhance) the rhythm of your verbal and physical performance. In its simplest terms, that just means making sure that the proceedings pause when you need them to, and that they move along at the pace that you expect them to, as appropriate. You can do that in lots of ways, but today we were injecting animations into the material based on how we think Vicki's narrative style will run. I think she's now got a first-rate presentation that any student of Project Management would find engaging, informative and helpful.

And then there's me. I wrote my slides over the course of two afternoons (about an hour and a half each day), late last week. I hadn't started them before that, and I pretty much put them out of my mind once I got them to a reasonable point last Friday. After all that time working with Vicki on her stuff today, I thought I'd better take another look at my own. I fiddled with them for about an hour, showed Vicki some of the changes I'd made, got feedback from her that resulted in me changing a few more things and adding a slide, after which I declared them "ready to go." I figure I've spent about 1/5 of the time Vicki has on hers.

Now, the disparity between our approaches will no doubt show up next week when she knocks her audience dead and the same third year students grow bored with the bearded nutjob who's going on and on about Agile. But I just look at what I have and think, "Yeah, I can work with that just fine!" So, if nothing else, I'm a bundle of (over)confidence and (potentially unjustified) calm. And I got to play a whole lot of Resistance 2 while she was busy working!