The week before APSA, I went to Foo Camp, a sort of hackers-meets-Obama-officials-meets-business-types-meets-weird-and-interesting-musicians event organized by O’Reilly media. One of the various interesting things for non-geeks was the Ignite style of presentation, which several of those gathered presented. Ignite gives you precisely (and only) five minutes to speak – your Powerpoint/Keynote or similar presentation has 20 slides that advance inexorably every fifteen seconds. What’s nice about it is that it forces people to cut to the chase. Presenters can bodge the format a bit (e.g. by having three identical slides in succession for a graph or idea that they want to dwell on for more than 15 seconds), but they have no choice but to finish before their five minutes are up. It left me wondering why APSA and other conferences don’t adopt a similar style (if, as is increasingly the case, conference facilities offer projectors in most or all of their rooms). I don’t think I have ever seen a conference presentation at APSA that couldn’t have been improved by being cut down to five minutes with inexorable advance, requirement for advance planning over what you actually want to say and so on. Indeed, I don’t think I have ever given a presentation that couldn’t have been so improved. This would of course be accompanied by a properly functioning website that professors actually uploaded their papers to in advance, so that people could actually read ‘em.
I can imagine that there would be howls of outrage from presenting professors who have grown all too accustomed to presuming upon the patience of their audience – but I can’t imagine but that it would be Pareto improving for them too (even if they felt that the world was being denied the full subtlety of their wisdom, they could feel pleased that the tedious and prolix monologues of their co-presenters were being cut down for size. And obviously, this would create actual space for debate of the papers rather than exchange of set positions. Maybe the political theorists (who are the most likely to gripe given that they do need to present subtle ideas; but also in my experience the worst presenters of their own work) could be cut a break, and given ten minutes instead of five. Any flaws with this that I’m not seeing?
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Two: APSA is far too staid an organization to accept such innovations on non-glacial time-scales, and unless applied universally it’d be poster sessions all over again: “you suck so you get a poster/5 minutes instead of 12-15 like the Big Boys do.”
That said, it would have the advantage of letting the program expand 50-100%, which would help APSA’s bottom line.
Far better to start a “naming and shaming” registry of political scientists who shirk conference obligations, along with mandatory penalties enforced by APSA, ISA, Polmeth, and the regionals. No paper? No conference presentations for 1 calendar year.
Sounds like a good idea for inside the classroom too.
Sounds like a good idea for inside the classroom, too.
Yes. I can’t imagine the screams of joy that would erupt from the students as the slides clicked inexorably past every fifteen seconds.
One suggestion: Why force slides to advance every 15 seconds? I tend to only use a small handful of slides; the screen is blank more than half the time while I’m talking.
But I’m all for reducing the time people get. And better yet, enforcing whatever time limit there is.
10 minutes, to me, is much more reasonable.
Those of us with our fancy regressions might be able to make our case by throwing up table 1 and table 5 and saying: “here, see!” but a qualitative case will often require more storytelling, and that simply takes time.
I like IGNITE, and regularly use the 5 minute rule in classes for presentations. But the origin of this idea is not IGNITE. The 5 minute rule has been standard in Chicago economics graduate school workshops for about 50 years. The speaker has 5 minutes uninterrupted, and if there are questions, they begin after 5 minutes. You know your presentation is not interesting to your audience if they let you go on for the full 45 minutes without interruption! Of course, at the Chicago workshops, the papers were available beforehand and the expectation was that people would read them.
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