Okay, Powerpoint and similar technologies are awesome tools for giving presentations... but my department at the university has gone totally overboard.
I have TWO group presentations in the hours from noon to 4pm today, and another tomorrow.
The presentations are freaking meaningless. One or more people in the group always slacks off and gets the same grade as everyone else. The presentation does nothing but have us regurgitate what we presumably learned.
It's gotten so bad I find myself wishing for a traditional exam in at least one class.
What the heck is going on? Is it just easier for professors to assign and grade group work? I understand that presenting is an important skill, but I feel like the sheer quantity here is undermining the educational value.
It's my understanding that in the work place, you do presentations sometimes but then you have to get back to actual work. I weep for the future where businesses full of people waste time presenting about presentations to eachother and nobody ever actually makes anything. </rant>
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I brief something every day from a .ppt presentation.
I receive PowerPoint briefs every day.
I read PowerPoint briefs every day.
I stress out over aligning boxes and sizing fonts and shading graphs and the best colors for both printouts and overhead projection.
I hate PowerPoint with a passion usually reserved for religious epiphany.
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So yeah, until you start having meetings to discuss what you are going to have a meeting about later that day, relax a bit. It gets worse. Sometimes they make some sense but people, and corporations get stuck in a rut thinking that there is but one way to do things and one size fits all and to make it we have to do it this way. Then spend tons of money to change they way we are doing something only to not use any of the innovations explored, discussed or promised to be used.
I am thankful nearly every day that I don't work in a big corporation.
My presentations are done by handing a piece of paper to people and explaining it. Or, if it's complex, by running a projection of the spreadsheet on the wall and explaining it.
In academia, I'm still only running up against one or two presentations per class. That's more than I'd like (give me a good, ol' fashion one mid term, one final and I'll be happy), but it's not too onerous.
Okay, Powerpoint and similar technologies are awesome tools for giving presentations... but my department at the university has gone totally overboard.
I have TWO group presentations in the hours from noon to 4pm today, and another tomorrow.
The presentations are freaking meaningless. One or more people in the group always slacks off and gets the same grade as everyone else. The presentation does nothing but have us regurgitate what we presumably learned.
It's gotten so bad I find myself wishing for a traditional exam in at least one class.
What the heck is going on? Is it just easier for professors to assign and grade group work? I understand that presenting is an important skill, but I feel like the sheer quantity here is undermining the educational value.
It's my understanding that in the work place, you do presentations sometimes but then you have to get back to actual work. I weep for the future where businesses full of people waste time presenting about presentations to eachother and nobody ever actually makes anything. </rant>
Making people that do not like working with other people isn't their purpose to make them sad and not learn anything.
I still get midterms in most classes. Heck midterms sounds better than group work. What are you studying?
I had to deal with it when I was in the military. We struggled to stay awake. The nickname, which may be army wide, was "death by powerpoint".
I'm an IT undergrad, to answer that question.
I had to deal with it when I was in the military. We struggled to stay awake. The nickname, which may be army wide, was "death by powerpoint".
I think I read an article somewhere about the military restricting the use of powerpoints because it was undermining actual planning...
So, I've decided to spurn powerpoint for tomorrow's presentation.
The topic is a film. I'm going to bring the film, cue it up to certain scenes, watch them, talk about them.
The madness ends here.
Okay, Powerpoint and similar technologies are awesome tools for giving presentations... but my department at the university has gone totally overboard.
I have TWO group presentations in the hours from noon to 4pm today, and another tomorrow.
The presentations are freaking meaningless. One or more people in the group always slacks off and gets the same grade as everyone else. The presentation does nothing but have us regurgitate what we presumably learned.
It's gotten so bad I find myself wishing for a traditional exam in at least one class.
What the heck is going on? Is it just easier for professors to assign and grade group work? I understand that presenting is an important skill, but I feel like the sheer quantity here is undermining the educational value.
It's my understanding that in the work place, you do presentations sometimes but then you have to get back to actual work. I weep for the future where businesses full of people waste time presenting about presentations to eachother and nobody ever actually makes anything. </rant>
Oh yes, I hate them. They're terrible, snore-inducing hate-filled things. Now Powerpoint can be used to great effect with a little humor, creative storytelling, and intimate knowledge of the topic... but most don't have that.
I'm in the military, and it's all we do. I sit through 3 or more 1+ hour briefings every week. The worst is regional training tele-conferences.
Go for it. Break the mold and get away from powerpoint.
It's not just the powerpoint... It's the people who work with it.
I work for the government. They race to issue the latest technology to old, techno-ignorant, workers who don't have the slightest idea how to use what they are given.
They give blackberries to high-ranking folks who have no clue what to do with them (they just keep vibrating, reminding them that they missed about 786 e-mails). They have people who work on Excel who don't even know what a formula is; they just make these cute pages and insert the numbers by hand (or worst, try to incorporate that ridiculous "spreadsheet" in a Word document). No one has a clue how to format a document after writting text/a letter, so when you recieve something, it's usually just plain text, in seven different fonts on a wierd paper format that screws up the printer when you try to print it. I sit next to people who actually PRINT every e-mail they get. Ugh!
Then there's power-point. Just text. Pages after pages of JUST TEXT... Why not just e-mail us the text so we could read it when we have five minutes? Is this hour-long meeting really pertinent?
I actually wished that yesterday's meteor hit the earth... It would have saved me from 20 more years of work.
Ultradan
I sit next to people who actually PRINT every e-mail they get.
I can top that... I worked in an office where the 'official way to archive mails' was to print them out, then scan the print, then archive the resulting pdf within the appropriate archive directory.
Of course, the printout was slepped into a ring binder as well...
When I was in college, I had a theory about ppt. It's a tool used extensively in the "real world". Professors wanted you to get some skill with it, so they'd assign you a presentation to do in their class. Some would make it a group presentation, so you'd have experience working with others to build a presentation and giving it. The problem? If every professor comes to these conclusions, then you face at least one of these for every class you take. And professors assign them for the end of the semester, with the result that you get hit over and over again at semester's end, after you've presumably learned something. Because you often have courses with multiple different professors each semester, none of whom have reason to coordinate these things, you get hammered with them. I had similar problems with paper writing my last semester, which entailed a combined total of 80 papers of varying lengths between 4 classes. It got old real quick.
On the topic of printed Emails - in my line of work, you HAVE to do that. It's gets really old, reprinting and replacing them every time someone sends a new message in the chain, so I normally wait until contract completion to do that...or file inspection if there's one coming down the line.
Personally, I keep maybe 20% of my e-mails (which I promptly put in the appropriate file) and delete the rest. Seriously, why would someone keep an email from IT telling us that they will be conducting an upgrade on Saturasy night around 11pm?.
Then about once a month, I delete all e-mails in my files that are two years or older. For my "personal" file (where I keep e-mails from friends/family), I clean that out everything older than three-four months.
This exercise takes me about ten-fifteen minutes.
(I've seen folks around here who HAVE NEVER DELETED AN E-MAIL SINCE 1997!!! ALL OF WHICH IS KEPT IN THEIR INBOX!!!!!!!)
Ultradan
See, stories like these are why I've never wanted to become an NCO. Because I know meetings just like those mentioned here await me when I do.
It's a mixed bag TOZ. You get to do a lot of good, a lot of mentoring and training and if that's your thing (I really enjoy it) then it's a great gig. You also deal with an enormous ammount of BS.
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See, stories like these are why I've never wanted to become an NCO. Because I know meetings just like those mentioned here await me when I do.It's a mixed bag TOZ. You get to do a lot of good, a lot of mentoring and training and if that's your thing (I really enjoy it) then it's a great gig. You also deal with an enormous ammount of BS.
Did you get a promotion I wasn't aware of? *checks global* Whatever are you talking about, SENIOR AIRMAN?
:P