Wired ran an article a few days ago about pecha kucha, an art-house event that turns PowerPoint on its ear and makes presentations bearable.
The rules are simple:
- 20 slides per presenter
- 20 seconds maximum per slide
- The presenter talks as the slides whiz across the screen.
- No questions may be asked during the presentation.
- When the show’s done, the presenter is done.
- Next presenter, please.
I checked Pecha-Kucha.org to see if there were any events posted for Honolulu. After all, there have been pecha kucha events in over 80 cities around the world since 2003.
No luck.
Pecha kucha in Honolulu?
But this seems like a natural for First Fridays. Pecha kucha was first developed for architects and designers, to keep their pitches reasonable. A typical pecha kucha event has 14 slide shows in a single evening. That’s 280 slides.
There are reports of businesses who use pecha kucha as a presentation format for internal meetings. Perhaps this works better when no one else in the room is using a laptop. This article in the New York Times and this Microsoft web page discuss how Microsoft managers deal with laptops in meetings.
Personal computer use in a meeting can be helpful, but a computer is often a distraction, especially when they’re connected to the Internet. Mobile devices are almost as bad, too.
Now I’m wondering if pecha kucha is a useful tool for teaching. While the format doesn’t leave much time for questions, it does provide a quick pace.
Could pecha kucha help in the classroom?
Over the years, I’ve given student presenters rules that are similar to pecha kucha. I hadn’t made the connection until today, though. One common issue was that students tend to have problem with time limits and slide counts, possibly because this type of presentation format takes some practice to do well.
This format might be very useful for presentations given in online courses, though.
