A recording of today's Teaching on the Go talk is below, the paper I'm referring to is here, and some of the debate (there's a fair amount of it at this stage) is here.
A recording of today's Teaching on the Go talk is below, the paper I'm referring to is here, and some of the debate (there's a fair amount of it at this stage) is here.
I take your point about Larry Lessig and giving slide shows, and about Steve Jobs too (Larry Lessig published Code 2.0 based on comments he received about the first edition on wikipedia, how about that!). Anyhow, I remembered something you might be interested in Stephen. Matt May and his recent book, In Pursuit of Elegance. I was listening to him at the leanblog.org website, and he has some interesting takes on marketing. You should check him out. Video cast interviews here:
http://www.leanblog.org/podcast/video-podcast/
Website here:
http://www.inpursuitofelegance.com/
Your description of the slideware presentation technique of Lessig, also reminded me a lot of Chris Cook, who showed 142 slides in Dublin in late 2008 after the financial meltdown at a Feasta organised event.
http://www.slideshare.net/ChrisJCook/equity-shares-a-solution-to-the-credit-crash-presentation
Here is his Vimeo talk:
http://www.vimeo.com/5639127
Like you say, minimal amount of information on each slide and increased no. of slides. I once heard of a famous US scientist, who had only a couple of slides, one which was a slide of an exponentially increasing curve (this was way back in the day, when overhead transparency technology was starting out and very expensive). Apparently, the scientist gave every lecture throughout his whole career simply using that same couple of slides. He never changed them. It didn't matter what he was talking about, he could use the exponentially increasing curve to explain everything and anything. I can't remember which one of the scientists this was now, but he was one of the big names, who had responsibility for a lot of government funding etc.
Frederick P. Brooks keeps the same set of slides for years and decades also I notice.
Hi Brian,
I had a professor who did more or less the same thing: he grabbed a random set of foils off his desk before every lecture, and talked about them. I think he had written them years before!
On the subject of bidding on the €20.00 note, I attended a lecture by the founder of 'tradesman dot ie' not so long ago. He had started multiple businesses before getting it right. I think 'tradesman dot ie' was this 10th attempt. Prior to that he had tried online dating dot ie, which was a great success. Until it transpired that Irish men like speed dating, but were not prepared to fork out money for it. So the business plan failed to identify that one flaw up front. I thought that was funny.
Yeah, there was a webcast by one of the founders of Seagate corporation I watched a while ago, and he gave a lecture recently, which used the same slides he had used back in the early 1990s. His occasion for the lecture, was historical as opposed to sales. He had gotten out of the disk drive industry a while back and was totally focussed on enjoying life (as do many other tech entrepreneurs), but his thesis was that, the hard disk drive industry had no changed in any fundamental way since the early 1990s, sufficiently to require a new lecture. I like that. I like it when a lecturers just couldn't be bothered updating his slides, I find it humourous in some way. Neil Downes, the son of J.V. Downes taught us in Bolton Street architecture school. Neil had a set of slides of cities and buildings he had taken on a 'grand tour' back in the 1960s. Now, can you imagine how fast moving design cultures are, like architecture. There is like this tsnunami of information about new designs beamed around the galaxy. And here in the middle of it all, Neil taught successive waves of decades of architectural students with the same slide set since the 1960s. In fact, around 1995, I had a tutor who had gone through Bolton Street a decade earlier and used the same slides.