I used to detest powerpoint slides and preferred copying things written on the whiteboard. This practice was drilled into me in high school. I would have notebooks and notebooks filled with notes. All information conveniently at my finger tips. As I went to undergrad, I continued this practice and occasionally computerized the notes, since my handwriting is less than legible. This was satisfactory for my own learning, but now I in addition to learning something myself, I also need to be able to explain it to other people. I find myself a very visual learner. I like looking at pictures and equations and don’t really pay attention to words. This makes powerpoint presentations nice since I can use minimal text and put images up. One thing powerpoint is great for is for highlighting things and showing changes between slides. I think powerpoint slides are perfect for displaying equations and how these equations change as you begin to solve it. You can also circle things and work them out. Now with tablets, you can draw on your powerpoint slides in real time and save what you drew. Some people even include blank slides to draw out things in class.

Powerpoint slides remind me of creating the figures for a research paper first and then writing the text. You want to show something, the text is there merely to highlight the journey, but the figures are the tourist destinations that you want to guide your reader through. When you make powerpoint slides, the goal is to distill complex information in its simplest form. I’m moving into the simple many slides school of thought, rather than few dense slides.

This all occurred to me as I was writing some LaTeX to go over an explanation. I found the writing tedious, I already had some slides that did a perfectly good job of explaining. For a course, I think it is best to have as many ways for the student to learn as possible: LaTeX lecture notes with lots of text, simple powerpoint slides, which go over derivations step by step and convey the main points, recorded video of someone going over the powerpoint slides, live demos to drive the point home, and visual breaks, because my hacker graphics professor likes putting in visual breaks. I think technology is going to make learning a lot easier. I think people are interested in learning, because they want to learn specific things. Rather than going over an entire course, people can pick what exactly they want to hear about if it is all documented and recorded.