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content/blog/2008-01-09-keynote.md

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+---
+title: Keynote
+date: '2008-01-09T09:24:16-05:00'
+permalink: /keynote/
+tags:
+    - conferences
+    - software
+---
+
+I spent most of yesterday working on cutting a 35-page paper down into the 15-20 minute talk I’ll be giving on Friday at a [NITLE symposium](http://nitle.org/index.php/nitle/opportunities/programs/upcoming_events/spring_2008/scholarly_collaboration_and_small_colleges_in_the_digital_age) on collaboration in the digital age, on a panel with [Laura](http://geekymom.blogspot.com/) and [Tim](http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/). Usually I find such cutting painful, but I was able to get through it fairly quickly. (That said, I am at the upper end of the time-frame, and if I were asked to whack out another two pages, I’d find it excruciating.)
+
+Last night, I started building the slides to go along with the talk, and the irony was somewhat inescapable, as yesterday’s [five years ago today](/im-gonna-take-you-on-a-surfin-oh-you-know/) post was in no small part about my skepticism at the announcement of Keynote. Did we really need “a happily Apple-y PowerPoint,” as I put it then, or should the goal really be *less* PowerPoint in the first place?
+
+My answer today is yes, on both counts, in no small part because Keynote *is* less than PowerPoint: less bloated, less ugly, less of a pain. I’ve only really started using slides with my talks in the last year, and part of the change for me has been working through a non-sucky way to use them. My slides are simple: black text on a white background, no transitions and only the occasional very plain build. I never treat them as cue cards or, god forbid, a script; except for some quotations I want to call attention to, they never replicate long passages of what I’m saying; they aren’t endless bullet-pointed lists. And as such they’re pretty useless without the talk; they’re more for punctuation, and the occasional illustration, than they are for conveying ideas in any expository sense.
+
+The slides, in effect, are utterly non-necessary, which makes me wonder whether I should bother spending the time on putting them together. I tend to find, though, that they help keep the audience focused on my ideas; the words “social interaction” on the screen can drive home the point of a sentence in a way that no amount of vocal emphasis can really manage.
+
+So five years on: yay, Keynote! But less.
+