I used to do it like that - the chalk and the blackboard, I mean. I had some notes in my hand. But I remember how it was to be a student, and writing like a blue streak for an hour just to get it all down. So I wrote the notes for them, and got them duplicated, so that I could talk
about the subject and they could listen to me instead of going for the speed-writing record.
One day I sent the collected notes to a publisher, asking if they were interested, and a couple of days later one of their minions arrived salivating at my office, and
this was the result.
Now, though, I'm teaching agricultural students. I inherited the PowerPoints from the girl who taught the class before me, although I have revised and improved them. I like the format. It gives structure to the lecture, and it's such an easy way to show pictures of stuff, and diagrams and graphs, which I do a lot. I see a sequence of text-only slides as a failure.
I try to ensure that the essential take-home facts are all on the slides. That way the lazy little buggers who were down the union bar the night before have at least some hope of passing the course if they at least get the PowerPoints off the teaching module and read them. But in the actual lecture, I talk
about the subject. I elaborate, I give them my opinion, I ask for their opinion, I ask for their experiences, and I tell relevant personal anecdotes that help make the material memorable.
I don't really intend to make an audio recording of the lectures. They're different every time, anyway. I was only musing about it because of the private project that caused me to start this thread.
There was some discussion about a possible public meeting and debate later this year, sponsored by JFM. One suggested format was that I should give a PowerPoint talk, presenting and explaining the basic facts and contentious issues about the Lockerbie affair, pitched to interested people who weren't intimately familiar with the details. It's unlikely this will go ahead, I think, but I decided to put a presentation together anyway.
The presentation came out rather long for its original intended purpose, at about 90 minutes. But I think it's a useful, and fairly novel, way of tackling the problem of explaining something like that. So now I've got the damn presentation, what do I do with it?
I have a pdf version, with the intended narration (much more structured than my usual free-associating lectures) printed below the slides, which of course aren't animated. It's OK, but ideally I'd like to make the presentation available online as a slide-show, with the audio narration and full-screen slides with (a few) animations. I don't know how to do this though, for people who don't have PowerPoint to view it, and especially not allowing anyone else to edit it. Ideally, once the narration was recorded with the timings, you'd just press a button that says "publish to YouTube" or something like that, but it ain't that simple I can see.
Rolfe.
ETA: I just counted. In that long presentation of 64 slides, just over half of them are text only. Would anyone like to look at the first half-dozen or dozen slides and critique the presentation?
What really turned me off both Wordperfect and Word was that they are essentially about formatting rather than about writing. I think of them as graphics programs for the blind.