Slideshare and the perils of powerpoint

On to Thing 11 and this time it's Slideshare. I looked at the presentations suggested by 23 Things Cambridge, and Heriot-Watt looks like they might have had a change in policy or personnel or something, since the last time they added a presentation was 2 years ago! I picked the exam survival guide, and immediately felt nostalgic for the time when all I had to worry about was exams! I also checked out one by Phil Bradley and despite this course feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Web 2.0 "stuff" out there - Pageflakes, Squidoo, Tagxedo &c., &c., &c... Still, I once spoke to the man himself about this, and his advice was plain and simple: try it out. Have a go. If it works, keep it, if it doesn't, lose it. And don't try and read everything on the internet! With these words of wisdom ringing in my ears, I blithely skip through the others suggested and then have a look at the search window.

I typed in "cambridge library" to see what came up. I found the slides from a presentation I attended during the libraries@cambridge 2009 conference, and to my surprise a presentation put together by a fellow cam23er! I also found some potentially interesting presentations about how to improve your library with tips for increased visibility, improving user experiences and so on.

I don't like sounding negative, particularly given I have only spent the sum total of about four hours browsing the site, but I think Slideshare doesn't really do it for me. The reason comes back ultimately to use of Powerpoint and/or other presentation software. In my experience as a student and as a conference attendee, I've probably been subjected to about 30-50 presentations which used Powerpoint, and possibly 10% of them were any good. People make a variety of mistakes when using slides, notably putting too much information on them, and then reading everything out verbatim, or adding slides which are distracting or irrelevant. The biggest mistake however, is taking them out of the presentation forum. I couldn't find slidenotes to accompany any of the sets of slides I looked at (maybe I'm being useless again). Now, if the presentation is good, and the use of slides thoughtful and serving to enhance the presentation, then the slides tend not to make sense without the presentation. On the other hand, if the presentation is bad, and all the information is on the slides instead of in the presenter's talk, then the slides are useless as a means of accompanying a good presentation... I'm not sure I'm explaining myself well here.

Basically, I doubt I would look here for new slides to accompany a presentation I want to give. If they're from a good presentation, I won't necessarily get the point they are serving to illustrate if the slidenotes aren't there. If they're bad, then I condemn my presentation to be bad by using them, but they may well serve as a tool for creating my own, better presentation. Looking at the one from the conference I attended, I can get a sort of gist of what was discussed, but without looking at the notes I made on the day itself, I couldn't tell you what the main arguments are just from the slides. Epic fail for this one!