Proceedings

Abstract:

Microsoft PowerPoint is ubiquitous, and therefore controversial. Most critiques, both of the software and of its widespread adoption in educational settings, express concerns that are not particular to PowerPoint alone, but apply to “slideware” presentations generally. The reliance on sequences and hierarchies of bullet points (a poor means of presenting some kinds of complex information), the foregrounding of visual gimmicks over content, the displacement of attention from the speaker and her message onto summary arguments presented dumbly on screen: far from being necessary features of presentation technology, these (according to the critics) prove to be shortcomings that interfere with, rather than enhance, a presenter's ability to communicate.

This paper presents an alternative to slideware, in the form of SVG graphics used for presentation. Why SVG? It meets all our functional requirements of a presentations technology; but even more importantly, as an XML-based format, Scalable Vector Graphics is well-suited to an XML-based production framework. Going far beyond sequences of bullet points, SVG supports open-ended, innovative uses of visual media in presentation. This becomes practical because the complexities of SVG coding can be relegated to a processing layer, following the classic design pattern of XML publishing:

XML source + XSLT stylesheet => formatted result

Commonly the formatted result of the process will be HTML or PDF; in this case it is SVG. Here too, this layered architecture provides great advantages: since the logic of its composition can be managed in the XSLT transformation, the XML source can be an abstracted model designed specifically for this purpose, allowing an author to work without concern for the details of SVG coding. So an author may code 12 lines of simple XML, which is rendered by a stylesheet into 52 lines of complex SVG. The XSLT transform does the heavy lifting, calculating relative sizes and positions of SVG elements and managing the code and links that provide for dynamic behaviors on screen.

A small number of pre-coded "presentation primitives" can thus be combined, and mixed with arbitrary SVG, to create a dynamic and interactive screen or set of screens, which the lecturer can navigate at will, traversing to or zooming into and out from particular visuals or points of interest. The style of presentation this encourages is much different from the usual rote rehearsal of bullet points: instead of an argument or exposition, the screen presents contextual information and evidence, both in text and visuals. Where slideware is linear and focuses attention on itself, an SVG presentation can be spatial and content-oriented, providing background and support to the presenter. Dynamic features such as customized menus and event-driven animation, rather than making for mere visual gimmicks without relation to the content, become functionally useful. And because SVG is also a general-purpose graphics format, the visual possibilities go far beyond what slideware can do unassisted.

The presentation will include a demonstration of at least one example (more if time permits) developed for and used in a real-world educational setting.