Anyway

When I was chair­ing the XML Con­fer­ence, one of the things I tried very hard to con­vince speak­ers to do was to write up their talks as pro­ceed­ings, and not just use slides. The main reas­on for that was that 6 months after giv­ing a talk, often­times the speak­ers can­’t fig­ure out what they meant with those slides, let alone people try­ing to make sense of them on their own. A writ­ten paper is much bet­ter at giv­ing people the inform­a­tion they’re look­ing for.

So I was inter­ested to see that Present­a­tion Zen recently wrote on the same top­ic. As the author says:

Power­Point is not the cause of bad busi­ness present­a­tions, but lazi­ness and poor writ­ing skills may be. The point is not to place more text with­in tiny slides inten­ded for images and visu­al dis­plays of data. The point is to first (usu­ally) cre­ate a well-writ­ten, detailed doc­u­ment. Do busi­ness people still know how to write?

Recently I’ve star­ted try­ing a dif­fer­ent way of cre­at­ing slide decks. I pull togeth­er a few slides with pic­tures or bul­lets, then write a doc­u­ment with gram­mat­ic­al Eng­lish, pic­tur­ing myself actu­ally giv­ing the talk, writ­ing what I plan to say. This leads to addi­tions and changes in the slides, and makes them more into the sup­port­ing visu­als that I think they should be. In the ideal case, I’d have time after the actu­al present­a­tion to edit the writ­ten-out talk to reflect what I really did say and pub­lish that togeth­er with the slides. I real­ise that the slides on their own often aren’t much use to any­one who was­n’t at the talk, or 6 months after­wards for any­one who was; that’s not always a prob­lem depend­ing on the audi­ence and the actu­al pur­pose of the talk. 

I do know of people who put a lot of work into mak­ing their slide decks suit­able for teach­ing pur­poses on their own without sup­port­ing doc­u­ments; those people who are good at that often use extens­ive speak­er­’s notes. And they’re usu­ally also good at writ­ing those full-length papers. Which leads me to sus­pect that there is some­thing to the slide-deck style that is appeal­ing — maybe it’s the sense that you get the import­ant inform­a­tion in the bul­lets? Maybe it’s respond­ing to people’s lazi­ness in reading? 

Dar­ren had a post prais­ing the idea of Single-Gender Groups. I find that very prob­lem­at­ic, and here’s why.

Dar­ren’s main point is that women and men com­mu­nic­ate dif­fer­ently. Per­son­ally I’ve found more dif­fer­ences in com­mu­nic­a­tion style in dif­fer­ent coun­tries; I’ve lived in (in chro­no­lo­gic­al order, and only count­ing places I’ve lived in for more than five years and where I’ve spoken the loc­al lan­guage flu­ently) New Zea­l­and, Aus­tralia, Ger­many, and Canada. For example, Ger­mans in my exper­i­ence are rel­at­ively dir­ect, both men and women. Cana­dians often aren’t. Aus­trali­ans are often also dir­ect, New Zeal­anders often aren’t. I tend to be more dir­ect than lots of people, which caused a cer­tain num­ber of prob­lems for me when I was grow­ing up.

One oth­er reas­on I have prob­lems with that atti­tude is due to the fact that I stud­ied phys­ics at uni­ver­sity, and was often the only woman in the room. Obvi­ously the few women study­ing related sub­jects often became friends, but most of my friends were men. Single-gender clubs would mean that I would­n’t be able to take part in activ­it­ies that the rest of my friends could take part in. Obvi­ously sports clubs pose a set of issues that often res­ult in the segreg­a­tion of those tak­ing part, but not for all sports and not neces­sar­ily for the social aspects of those clubs. 

You could say the answer to that is hav­ing more women study phys­ics or maths, but that’s the answer to a dif­fer­ent ques­tion. My ideal is not that there are lots of single-gender groups and every­one finds them ok, but that both men and women can take part in groups where they find the intel­lec­tu­al stim­u­la­tion or enter­tain­ment that they are look­ing for, not restric­ted by people’s expect­a­tions based on their gender, or indeed their name (anoth­er one of Dar­ren’s posts). There are men who knit, you know, even if not very many.

Tim poin­ted me at the art­icle on devchix about bar­ri­ers women face in tech com­munit­ies; it’s cer­tainly sparked a lot of interest and reac­tions out there.

My reac­tion was two-fold: one was to think “is that how most women are?” To under­stand that, you have to remem­ber that I’ve spent my entire life past the age of 17 in groups that were pre­dom­in­antly male, first in phys­ics, and then in com­puters. I’ve often dis­covered that I look at things one way and some woman I talk to about it will see it quite dif­fer­ently. So until I read some reac­tions to this art­icle, I thought maybe it explained some­thing about the way women-only groups work that I did­n’t know about, since I’m not actu­ally in any (even the book­club I’m in is has men and would­n’t feel right to me if it did­n’t; the only groups I’ve been in recently that were only women were knit­ting classes and those only last a short time).

The second reac­tion was that she makes some fairly strong state­ments that are test­able (there’s that phys­ics back­ground com­ing out): 

I have exper­i­mented with this myself using a male pseud­onym to post art­icles, and being told that the art­icles are inform­at­ive, use­ful, great. Six months later I repub­lish the exact same art­icle, using a dif­fer­ent title and a female pseud­onym, and sud­denly the art­icle is hor­rible, tech­nic­ally incor­rect, use­less. It’s a fas­cin­at­ing study.

It’s actu­ally a hard thing to test. Many people pub­lish art­icles on their blogs, so they can­’t sud­denly change their name and gender for that; where else do people pub­lish these days? How much of pub­lish­ing inform­a­tion is about repu­ta­tion, where the read­ers say the per­son has been right about oth­er things in the past, prob­ably is about this as well? That also does­n’t enable switch­ing iden­tit­ies read­ily. I would like to see some actu­al data and test­ing of the pro­pos­i­tion, and not just from one person.

Shel­ley wrote up her reac­tion; read both the art­icles as well as some of the com­ments and links for a fuller view. [At first I wrote “bal­anced view”, but until we know more about the issues, who’s to say where the centre (and there­fore the bal­ance point) is?]