Will the slides be available at the end?
When you answer yes, you can hear the sigh of contentment that excuses any further effort. It’s as if you’ve given people permission to kick their shoes off, lean back and relax into a period of passive listening.
A yes means you remove the need to take notes. Pens are laid on desks and, if face to face, laptops closed as people step away from any attempt to record their interpretation of events.
What to do?
- Take your content out of the slides and make content what you say and not what you publish
- Use 3 word slides which outline your concepts but need further explanation
- Use slides which feature images only as a representation of your thoughts
- Restrict your use of diagrams – get people to draw your models themselves
Stop giving out slides.
If we’re giving people a product as a souvenir of an experience, why are we surprised attendance is misrepresented as learning?
Lost and Desperate 
Hear, Hear. Visual references and links only on slides for me, with maybe just the odd bulleted list of keywords.
Mind you, I do sometimes make those slides available at the beginning, either on paper as notes pages for offline note-taking, or in a digital file with working links. That way, the audience can annotate my slides themselves, retaining the visual reference alongside their observations. Seems popular when I do. I should probably do it more often, to be honest.
LikeLike