Four years ago, Jacob Levy inspired me to explain how I love education. This blog post eventually became a whole chapter in The Case Against Education on “Is Education Good for the Soul.” Here are the slides for a recent talk summarizing my conclusions.
Enjoy.
READER COMMENTS
Matthew Moore
Jul 4 2016 at 8:42am
Are these the slides that you actually stand up and present to people? They are useful as a summary for readers, but they are hardly optimised for presentation.
The slide deck that is sent out after the talk should have summary bullet points as here.
But if you voice over on this, people are either listening or reading, but not both at the same time. The visual and audio content of a presentation should be neither identical nor perfect substitutes, but rather complementary.
I like your slide titles. Otherwise from slide two retain only bullet two, from slide three only bullet two (incl sub bullets), from slide four only bullet one, from slide five only bullet four (incl sub bullets), slide six unsure but probably one and three, slide seven – one and two.
The reason rest of the information can be delivered from memory or notes, with these slides available as handouts after the talk.
If you can do away with text slides altogether, you will probably find your talks improve a great deal, but very few people ever take that advice. Slides should be for diagrams and charts only, in my opinion.
jon
Jul 4 2016 at 7:04pm
Matthew Moore writes:
I agree that too many lecturers put too much information in their slides (a tendency I have to fight in myself). But I disagree that one should do away with slides entirely, that seems baby with the bathwater to me. This Larry Lessig lecture on copyright is a pretty good example of slides done right – this lecture would not be improved by getting rid of them.
bmocon13
Jul 6 2016 at 9:26am
Do you ever record your lectures? The slides are great, but the real Caplan magic really only able to be captured in a recording, at least until you release the book. It’d be great to see you host an MRU class or something like that someday.
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