--On Friday, March 30, 2012 09:20 +0200 Steven Bellovin
<s...@cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
>...
> I'll note that folks who are non-native speakers of English
> are often helped significantly by having slides projected.
> I've certainly seen many people taking pictures of the screen,
> back before early upload was the policy.
Agreed, but I'd like to expand on this a bit.
(1) Almost any observation that is based on the advantages of
slides by non-native speakers also applies to real-time minutes,
transcripts, Jabber sessions, etc. Done well, any or all of
them may be easier to understand than a real-time speaker,
especially one who is speaking too quickly.
(2) The symmetric situation applies as well. We have presenters
who speak too rapidly, have accents or styles of speaking
English that are hard to understand, and so on. Having good
slides, etc., available may considerably facilitate
understanding, even (or especially) by native speakers of
English and, in some cases, by native speakers of some other
language than that of the presenter.
In both cases, a comment I made in the Jabber room may be
relevant: seeing the slides in real time may be great (and may
be very important for knowing when and how to ask questions),
but, if one is trying to use the slides to help in understanding
rather than merely to help with or keep context, the ability to
scroll backwards (and even forwards) may be a critical feature.
Of course doing that interacts with comments about how much is
happening on the screens of such participants, how many windows
one needs to watch, etc. As a trivial example, an application
that thinks it is so important that it has to seize focus and
maybe take the screen over every time something happens (new
slide, new message, etc.) can rather quickly turn into a
cognition-impairing nightmare.
john
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