I gave a presentation in the Statistical Consulting course at UW-Madison today. I’ve done so a number of times in the past 6 years. Until today, I’d just spoken informally from a few pages of notes. (Earlier this year, I wrote up those notes as a blog post.)
This year, just 45 min before the class, I thought I’d quickly create some slides to present. I thought it’d be an interesting “experiment” (not in the formal sense):
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Could I quickly create usable slides using the LateX/Beamer template I wrote about yesterday?
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Would it be useful to have slides in this class?
The outcome was pretty clear: It was easy to create a bunch of bullet-point-based slides. They look nice. (See the pdf here; source here.)
But, the slides themselves worse than useless: Unnecessary, and they interfered with the desired informal nature of the discussion.
I won’t be using those slides again. I’ll go back to just talking from notes.
Fortunately, the students were really good and involved and asked great questions, anyway. So no real harm done.