[mattstocum]

Considering that the teaching method of a lot of faculty has become doing nothing more than reading the slides to the class, I can't say I find that surprising. Some of the best PowerPoint presentations I've ever seen have nothing more than a single word or compound word as a slide. Regardless of what anyone thinks of him, watching Steve Jobs deliver a keynote can give you a lot of good material to imitate. Your slide deck should be there to support your presentation, not be your presentation.

[MrTonyD]

Kind of off topic - but I happened to be sitting next to Steve when he created a couple of those conference talks. He literally started preparing months before the talk. He would work on his wording over and over and over. Since I happened to be there, he would often try out his "lines" on me and ask me what I thought (I had to correct him a lot. He really wasn't technical all.) He practiced over and over. And for the diagrams he had good help from people who understood that simple diagrams are always better (avoid cognitive overload). And don't buy the book "Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" - I looked though it and that author has no clue about how those presentations were really created.

[markbernard]

Agreed. Seth Godin does this as well.