• Dagnet@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Add to that going back 2-3 slides every 5mins and you get my professor at uni. Watching his classes was actual torture

    • rockerface 🇺🇦@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      One of my teachers at uni used a Word document instead of a presentation. And yes, he still read it word for word. It was like a very shitty audiobook

      • Dagnet@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        There was a guy, I shit you not, that would ask him to go back to the previous slide cause he wasn’t done writing it down

        • Igloojoe@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          Like bro, i’m almost sure the professor will post the pp online. You dont have to copy the presentation… take shorthand notes…

          • Dagnet@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Nah, he didnt post the presentation online. Still, the slides were worthless and had nothing of value on them, the entire class was really a waste of time, no reason to copy anything

      • mPony@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Bob The Boomer may have been passive-aggressively trolling the presenter. “I’m not in here with you, you’re in here with me” kind of thing.

  • AntY@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    At university, I had a lecturer who took this one step further. Instead of a power point, he used a word document that he read word by word.

    • Kornblumenratte@feddit.de
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      8 months ago

      legere (lat) to read => lectura (lat) the reading event => lecture (en) => lecturer (en) a person giving/hosting a reading event.

      A lecturer is supposed to read the text of a book to students so that they are able to write it down and obtain a copy of it for themselves.

      Books written by professional scribes are incredible expensive, and this new thing they established in Bologna in 1088 – the so called “universities” offering lectures will be a major breakthrough in the history of mankind to distribute knowledge!

      Good to know some professors still honour the only true way of teaching.

      • trolololol@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Pfff this generation is wasting good expensive sheets of paper when good old oral tradition has worked for thousands of years. Writing was invented only 4000 years ago and still haven’t caught on.

      • cerement@slrpnk.net
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        8 months ago

        books written by professional scribes are incredible expensive

        some things haven’t changed …

      • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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        8 months ago

        A lecturer is supposed to read the text of a book to students so that they are able to write it down and obtain a copy of it for themselves.

        Does this still happen, with digital and all?

  • Deestan@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Oh no my kid’s school just texted me he got a fever I have to go. Hate to miss the presentation, can you post the slides in chat after? Thx!

  • jaybone@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    It’s even more fun when your manager makes you do a presentation. And he schedules it at 10pm, so that all the people 12 timezones away can attend at their “morning time.”

    But they don’t even bother to join the zoom. The only people attending are also in your timezone up way later than they want to be. And he’s like “it’s ok, we’ll record it for them.” Like wtf.

    And then they go and do stupidass incorrect shit anyway, whether they watched the recording or not.

  • theneverfox@pawb.social
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    8 months ago

    I’ll never forget the one professor who put up a side of code… And had no idea what the class was about. We spent most of the class reading together with him to try to figure out what the lesson was supposed to be about

    Apparently the guy was one of those crazy low-level guys who can do things I don’t understand but build on top of. Guy just constantly looked bewildered by reality, he belonged in the code world

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        8 months ago

        Semaphores. It was obviously C++ code with a bunch of threads, but as it was a standalone C++ program it wasn’t really clear why it was lol

        • jaybone@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          By low level guys, you mean he knew about circuits and EE? But he got stuck teaching a C++ class but he couldn’t code?

          • theneverfox@pawb.social
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            8 months ago

            By low level, I mean like kernel work. I’m told he worked on one of the 'nixes way back when.

            It was a data structures class, we did Java or Python in the into classes, php & js for Web + db basics and C++ for theory classes. Then you pick your path

            Anyways, the guy taught OS, language design, and data structures. He could code fine, he was just a terrible lecturer - extremely disorganized, no lesson plans. He only wasted the one full class forgetting why we were there, but reading his code (labeled by week) then scribbling on the whiteboard was his lecture

            I guess I ended up understanding data structures and I never fell asleep, so maybe he wasn’t a bad teacher. It was just mostly just assignments, he didn’t really do quizzes and the final wasn’t much of the grade

            • uis@lemm.ee
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              8 months ago

              Why data structures weren’t in C/C++? It would make sense to care about structures, cache locality, SoA/AoS, indirections and stuff in some language that compiles in native code.

              • theneverfox@pawb.social
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                8 months ago

                Ah, I phrased that ambiguously - it was in C++, all of our computing theory type classes were.

                I just got distracted realizing I graduated proficient in 9 languages and reasonably comfortable in another 3. 2 were from internships, but the rest were all from coursework. The last couple years, I was juggling 2-4 at all times, plus the odd scripts

                I always thought I was really good at picking up and switching languages, but I just realized my program was designed that way.

                That feels like a lot, do other colleges do something similar?

                (I guess you could knock off 3 because we ended up switching every semester in software engineering because cross platform apps were pretty bad at the time)

                • marcos@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  My undergrad officially required Pascal, C, C++, Java, PHP, Prolog, Lisp, x86 and MIPS assembly. You couldn’t work around those. There was also Tiger, VHDL, and Bash that were required, but you would probably not count as languages. (I’m certainly forgetting some stuff too.)

                  There was a virtual certainty you’d need some more languages, but not everybody would need the same ones.

                • jaybone@lemmy.world
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                  8 months ago

                  Once you are in the industry long enough, you won’t even remember how many different languages you have worked with.

                  A good education and experience should get you to the point where you are comfortable picking up and using any language, even if it is new to you.

            • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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              8 months ago

              I was thinking that you meant like, machine code, by “low level” and yeah. C wouldn’t make a lot of sense to someone who handles machine code.

              • theneverfox@pawb.social
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                8 months ago

                I’d call that hardware - if you’re code enough to the metal to be writing machine code (or even assembly), the physical architecture of the hardware is part of your code

                Low level generally is one step up - manual access to memory, compiling to an architecture rather than a virtualization layer, etc

                Strangely, the guy that taught OO theory did our hardware class, we built bit shifters and wrote programs in risc assembly… And ONE program in machine code with the promise we’d never have to do it again

                I could understand someone who writes in assembly, but machine code is a nightmare…I think I got it without any mistakes, but my butthole was clenched for 4 hours, terrified I’d have to debug it

                • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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                  8 months ago

                  Right. That’s my bad. I’m not a programmer or developer, so I conflate machine code and assembly far too frequently.

        • uis@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          Oh no, synchronization primitives!

          Well, you can end up implementing synchronization primitive if you are writing game. Sometimes game engine is kernel in userspace.

          • theneverfox@pawb.social
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            8 months ago

            I’ve done it in a Python system at work before. We used a mutex?(The int, not the lockout) to track worker threads

            It’s a hell of a lot easier these days… It’s amazing how quickly programming advances when you look back

            I’m interested in how this came up in a game engine though, and how recent it was

  • BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    Here is my opinion: Slide should have images, diagrams or charts to illustrate what I say, almost never any text. What I say is written in advance in the notes of the presentation that is only visible to me while presenting, but will be readable by anyone who look at the file afterwards. I prepare the duration and delivery of the speech at least three times in full before presenting.

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    8 months ago

    Have you ever been to an office meeting that turned out to be a CEO circlejerk that dragged on for hours?

    But a friend of mine went to the grandaddy of them all, something about state politics, some ambitious asshole making a power play and filibustering for an entire day, he had come prepared specifically to wear everyone down, I think he was trying to approve a new set of rules and conditions that benefitted his position, something along those lines.

    • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      CEO of our company does one every single Friday at lunch over zoom. Luckily I have never attended. But my boss does has to eat his lunch while listening to CEO talk about all the ways they doing great when we aren’t.

        • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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          8 months ago

          “Oh, looks like nobody’s doing anything during their lunch break, so I’m sure it’ll be fine to schedule a meeting during it.”

          If they’re paying for lunch, I’m fine with it. If not, I’m not fine. My lunch is my time to recharge for the rest of the workday.

          • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            My manager is salary so they work them like slaves. He works 6.30am to 4.30p every day and even answers emails while vacation.

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      8 months ago

      If somebody did that, I’d disapprove of those rules out of pure spite.

  • jsheradin@kbin.social
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    8 months ago

    Even if I’m only presenting a handful of slides I’ll slap some blank ones on the end just to make everyone sweat over “Slide 1 of 83”. Everyone is pretty darn quiet and glad to help speed things along most of the time.

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    8 months ago

    People who aren’t good at presentation making think that they are supposed to convey absolutely everything they are saying and be crammed full of information. I was doing a group presentation sometime ago where my group members insisted I put paragraphs of info in my slides and were worried we would fail for not enough information. Even after explaining that they were meant to guide the audience in what I was going to say, they insisted that it was wrong

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Also:

    Presenter: Can we hold all questions to the end, please? Thank you!

    The end obviously never arrives.

    • Rolivers@discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 months ago

      Usually there aren´t any at the end. Perhaps only one or two people actually paid attention and they don´t want to put themselves in the spotlight.

  • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 months ago

    My best presentation at university was during a small seminar. It was a 45min talk about 3 papers and how they relate to each other. I procrastinate a lot, so I didn’t really do anything besides reading those papers until the day before my presentation. That day, a friend called for a spontaneous barbecue, so I had just an odd hour to actually prepare slides. I managed 8 slides in total, the rest I just impromptu recalled from memory. People liked it and it was the least effort I put in any talk I held at university.

    • Grippler@feddit.dk
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      8 months ago

      reading those papers

      Woah there Mr. Overachiever, you’re making the rest of us look lazy…

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Honestly, that’s the right way to do it if you really know your stuff.

      The slides are there as a visual aid or backdrop. The “presenter notes” is where all your bulleted items and prompts for recollection go.

      Also, and this is where a lot of people get it wrong, the slide deck is NOT a useful document for distribution. It is specific to both the subject matter and speaker; it’s analogous to sheet music. A video of the presentation (e.g. TED) is far more useful as we’re really talking about a performance. At worst, there should be “references” page in some appendix, with hyperlinks to actual media that folks can digest on their own time.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The best presentations are about topics you know well enough to discuss at length, and aren’t constrained by paragraphs of points you need to get through. And a presentation is the best way to explain a graph or diagram.

  • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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    8 months ago

    It really baffles me when people make presentations like this. It’s such an easy thing to correct as well but it just keeps happening.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    I hate this. It’s basically just a lecture with slides as the cue cards, which the audience can read for themselves.

    It’s like having subtitles in real life.

    Ugh. Give me some data, graphs, or pictures of cats to look at for the slideshow or something. Something other than what you’re saying. If you add nothing to what we’re seeing, then… I have eyes. I don’t need you to read it for me.

    PowerPoint, at least, has a notes section and a presenter view, so you can hook your computer up with the projector or TV or whatever as a second monitor and PowerPoint can be set up to use the TV/projector/whatever, as the slide show, and give you a presenter view on your screen which shows the current slide, and all your notes.

    So if you can’t get relevant pictures, at least put up something interesting to look at, and leave the cue cards notes in the notes section, so the audience doesn’t have to stare at the exact words you’re saying, as you’re saying them, because I guarantee you that if you do, I’ll be judging you on your spelling and grammar.

    • labsin@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      I do like subtites almost everywhere, but hate these slides.

      Maybe I also want adjustable playback speed, fast forward and readable high contrast subtites in my real live playback.

    • olutukko@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Yes. A good slide show contains a lot of visually pleasing elements that are easy to read and understand but they still hold a lot of information. Like graphs or statistics or just bulletin points with some keywords or single short paragraohs that tell how it is in a nutshell. Then the one who makes the presentation should tell the rest

      A good way would be to write an essay with all the information you need. Then you would strip just the most important main elements and add those to the slide show.

      That way I got the best grade from one course even though I submitted it late and lacked a lot of other tasks in the course. The teacher was actually impressed by how much information I packed in so simple powerpoint. I also had like 20 sources, did it all in on afternoon the day before deadline lol. Adhd is interesting. You procastinate something for weeks and then do multiple days work in one crunch. Medication would be neat but I live in a country where you can’t get medication even if you smoke weed.

      Anyways. I don’t know why I wrote all this. I should be programming

      • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        Damn. Are you me? I’m not a programmer so I guess not.

        I was hounded by one of my HS teachers to put in a little more effort, constantly.

        I got annoyed by this and basically rage-wrote an essay that was due in the span of a few hours the night before it was due. Despite my lack of sources (I couldn’t be bothered to look up the information), I still got an A on the paper. She stopped telling me to try harder. IDK if that’s because she realized I didn’t do poorly because I couldn’t understand, because I clearly did, or she was just satisfied that she got me to do something and didn’t bother pestering me about it, but regardless, I felt like I won.

        I never did that well on anything else in her class. I just couldn’t be bothered.

        20+ years later, it turns out I have ADHD. So yeah. That explains a lot.

        • olutukko@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          School before realizing I have concentration problems was mysterious time. I juat didn’t feel like doing stuff and I didn’t know why.

          Also yeah your teacher propably just thought that you would need extra work to understand the course. I had a teacher who actually told me that when he first started teaching me he thought I’m a bit dumb, a below average student. But then he came to realize that I’m actually really smart but I just don’t do anything. It felt weird because at the same time I wad proud that a teacher actually said to me that I am smart. But at the same time I started wondering that why I indeed didn’t do anything.

          I’m going to finally get my meds though, I just have to piss in a jar to prove I’m not smoking weed for like half a year lol. But I have gotten to the point where I don’t feel like it’s going to be an issue. I’m about to turn 24, weed used to be my coping mechanism to a lot of stuff but I have matured now and I feel like a long break would just do really good. Also I want those meds cuz my school isn’t going that well and I want to graduate and get a job already :D the courses aren’t hard but I usually lose the motivation one montv in and after that trying to finish the course is insanely hard

          • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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            8 months ago

            I was diagnosed a few years ago. I was 39. I’ve been on meds since.

            My HS experience was fairly typical for an ADHD kid before ADHD was a thing… I was called lazy, I was told I needed to apply myself (whatever that means), etc. I believed it. I just thought I was a lazy ass little shit. I didn’t know why, but the evidence was clear. I understood the information, I just didn’t do any of the work.

            Oh well. Live and learn. I eventually made it through college, and into a career, all without meds. It was a painful struggle, especially when dealing with the more monotonous tasks associated with having a job… I was chronically late, I slept in a lot… I was just all over the place.

            Now, with the meds, I still have my hair share of bad days, but when I’m faced with the horrendous burden of monotonous tasks, instead of having to force myself to do it, I usually have more of an attitude of “whelp, I better get this done so I can move on”. It’s no longer an impossible task to simply get myself started on something that’s not very stimulating.

            It’s nice.

            • olutukko@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              That does sound reallu peaceful compared to this. I bet it was even harder at you time of youth when people didn’t understand the condition.

              It’s honestly really super weird nobody noticed that I might be a bit odd. Like I had alll the signs now that I recall. Even some stuff related to asperger. But I just went straight trough the filters

              • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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                8 months ago

                Well, my parents weren’t the greatest. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all that they did for me, but I rarely ever saw my doctor outside of getting shots or whatever… Typical stuff.

                Basically, unless I had an obvious and physical problem, like a not insignificant injury or infection, we dealt with it ourselves. So I’m not surprised that I fell through the cracks, so to speak.

                I did ok in school. I could have done way better, but I at least passed pretty much every class I took. There were some exceptions in college due to extenuating circumstances, but I got it done.

                The change happened when I started researching ADHD because my SO has a solid diagnosis for it, so I wanted to understand them a little bit better, and a lot of the symptoms just resonated with me. So I took action, got assessed and now I’m medicated for it and I couldn’t be happier about it. My brain works differently. I’m different. That’s not a bad thing (could you imagine how boring it would be if we were all the same?). I’m proud of myself.

                I’m not really shy about telling people about it, though I tend to keep it to myself until it’s relevant… I don’t go into a room full of new people and blurt out that I’m on meds for ADHD. But if someone asks, I don’t have any hesitation in telling them. There’s so shame in it, there’s no reason to be ashamed of it. My brain works counterintuitively, and I’ve done my job as a human, and gotten treatment so I can function normally. I’m not responsible for my brain chemistry being all screwed up.

                Anyways. I feel like I’m talking in circles now. I hope you have a good day.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      So if you can’t get relevant pictures, at least put up something interesting to look at

      Got it. Filling my PowerPoint Deck with porn, and pictures of Battlemechs

    • Wogi@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It’s pretty bad practice to just read what’s on the slide. Presentations would be prepared in such a way, and known to a degree where the slides act as refreshers for the presenter with something visual to give context. There are specific cases where you can’t get away from it, but those are incredibly specific and not very common. Like, safety meetings with specific things that need to be read verbatim to every employee, and even those still need something to break it up. I can’t think of another example.