From the exception-that-proves-the-rule department, when you are giving a presentation at an international conference (and I recommend this highly), many people in the audience may not be native speakers of the conference lingua franca and it is a good idea to summarize your talk in bullet points on slides so that everyone can follow what you are saying.

Good communication is full of nuance, and it sucks to not understand what someone is saying just because they think bullet points in PowerPoint are evil.

And um yeah, I was the guy who did it wrong.

Just FYI, I have created a very video-heavy presentation. I was talking to a mob of art librarians about Second Life, and wanted to keep the presentation tight. I made separate machinima and interspersed it throughout my talk… 1) A flying tour of Info Island. 2) A tour through an Art Garllery on Info Island Two and then a tour through the Museum of Music to show how good interactive design can be used in Second Life exhibits 3) An avatar walking through and interacting with an art installation funded with a $20K Australia Council grant. … I spoke over these bits, so neither the talking or visual part of the presentation would have worked in isolation.

I also included lots and lots of screenshots that I used to illustrate my points as I talked.

The night before most of my presentations, I open up Audacity, slip on a headset and record my talk exactly as I intend to do it. I can then quickly make a slidecast if I have time. I think of that as my handout. It also means that if someone asks me months and months later to give the same or similar talk, I understand what all the slides mean … I never write a text outline of what I am going to say…

I also liked that you said “The presentation of information should be important to our profession.” I think it actually would behoove information professionals to take acting lessons and communications classes. I’m just saying.

I really don’t have an opinion about videos in presentations. Haven’t seen it happen very often. A lot would depend on how much the video is appropriate. Is it just filling time or is it really adding something.

I think the more the slide-speech interaction is getting the audience to make connections and to think, the more they are engaged. But that’s not in isolation of just plain old interesting and engaging topics (which, if lacking, makes all of these styles pointless).

I have been surprised by the number of folks who post their presentations online. This practice would be informative except that frequently there is no accompanying notes or audio. Slides with one or two words or just a picture are great live while you are there to hear the speaker. But, later, as an online resource, they are basically useless. It has become a frustrating result when searching for current thought on library issues.

I encourage folks to add notes or audio to make them truly useful for folks who did not attend their original presentation.

In my mind, this presentation, ca. 2004 or 2005, was probably the landmark moment for Ruby, Rails, and screencasting. It’s funny, though: watching it now is a bit like watching the original Star Wars. I remembered an audio track in the Rails video, but I guess I was wrong, because there isn’t one. It’s just DHH installing Rails and creating an app.

Back to your point: this presentation is process-oriented, as you noted in discussing “Slides Carry Presentation,” and it’s also not a deck of slides, it’s a screencast. But it’s also a nice reminder that sometimes the best thing a presenter can do is eliminate commentary and let a process or space speak for itself.