Pecha Kucha Academia?
I was reading Presentation Zen, Garr Reynold’s new book (link is to his great blog). In there he has a side bar on Pecha Kucha (Japanese for chit-chat) — a night where architects get together and, if they present, they are only allowed to use 20 slides and each slide can only be on screen for 20 seconds. 
That’s a 6:40 presentation run, no exceptions.
It is an interesting constraint to a presentation and one that would be very interesting for academic talks. We already present under time limits, but don’t have the slide restrictions.
I think having a restriction on slides to precisely 20 images, makes you become more explicitly aware of what you are going to do with each one rather than just stringing together a bunch of slides. 20 seems a reasonable number to get students or faculty to start experimenting with.
Some groups are apparently trying this. I might try and suggest this for our department. It is definitely something I would like to try. There is a group not far away – but my topics of medicine / informatics might not quite fit what they want…
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