NPR discusses organizations which have banned PowerPoint presentations. Here’s a pro tip: if your audience is tuning out your presentation, you’re doing it wrong. (Here’s how to do it right.)
About six months ago, a group of physicists in the U.S. working on the Large Hadron Collider addressed a problem they’ve been having for a while: Whenever they had meetings, everyone stuck to the prepared slides and couldn’t really answer questions that weren’t immediately relevant to what was on the screen.The point of the forum is to start discussions, so the physicists — from then on, they could only use a board and a marker.
"The use of the PowerPoint slides was acting as a straitjacket to discussion," says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and one of the organizers of the forum at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.He says it was as if "we removed the PowerPoint slide, and like a big glass barrier was removed between the speaker and the audience."
The communication became a lot more two-way instead of just the speaker speaking at length for 15, 20 minutes. The audience really started to come alive, to look up from their laptop computers and actually start participating in the discussion, which is what we were really trying to foster."
via Physicists, Generals And CEOs Agree: Ditch The PowerPoint : All Tech Considered : NPR.
I like Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule, personally: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html