Death by laser pointer
It seems that people have now been using Powerpoint for sufficiently long that “Death by Powerpoint” is a rare event at conferences these days. Alas, this morning I felt the life being sucked from me by misuse of a laser pointer.
The two most obvious problems that inflict laser pointing users are that:
- it causes the speaker to turn their back to his/her audience so they can point at the screen;
- a bright spot whizzing around the screen in a random manner is very distracting.
I think a more fundamental problem is that the ability to point at one’s slides also encourages the speaker to talk to the slides rather than using them as a visual aid supporting one’s talk.
June 11th, 2005 at 9:53 am
I much prefer having a BIG STICK to point at the screen with than a laser pointer. Plus you can drop it in a comedy manner…