Cesena E., Vernizzi D.

English

PORTO Publications Open Repository TOrino

DIDAMATICA 2011 – ISBN 9788890540622 
Slides for teaching: the slim approach* 
Emanuele Cesena, Davide Vernizzi 
Dip. di Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino 
Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino (TO) 
{emanuele.cesena, davide.vernizzi}@{polito.it, sli-m.com} 
We describe the slim approach for making presentations 
using mind maps, which is particularly useful to assist the 
“slide maker” while thinking about and structuring her 
presentations. As presentations become larger, like for 
teaching purposes when creating and updating a course, we 
believe this approach to be particularly effective, and that 
common tools like PowerPoint fail to provide support to the 
user in managing and organizing the information she wants 
to lay out. We also present our effort in creating the sli-m, 
slide machine, a web application publicly available at 
www.sli-m.com, that materializes our idea allowing further 
enhancements like collaboration between users or 
integration into existing e-Learning portals.  
* An extended version of this paper is available at www.sli-m.com/publications 
1.Introduction  
In the last decade, the employment of slides as teaching tools has seen a 
large increase, especially in universities and technical schools. Although several 
studies indicate that students prefer computer slides to other types of material 
[Bartsch and Cobern, 2003, Parker et al, 2008], their effectiveness from the 
pedagogical point of view is still debated. In their work, Bartsch and Cobern 
point out that slides become less effective if they are complex or overloaded 
with multimedia elements such as sounds or irrelevant pictures. Therefore, the 
main problem is how to create effective presentations. 
Presentations are usually created with the help of computer programs such 
as PowerPoint. Since their introduction in the late '80s, these tools have always 
been designed around the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) 
paradigm, in the sense that they allow to draw a presentation exactly the way it 
will look like. However, they do not assist the user in what we believe is the 
most important phase, namely to think what it will look like, and structure the 
set of slides accordingly. 
Starting from this observation, we elaborated a new approach for creating 
presentations using mind maps, that are powerful instruments for studying and 
organizing information. In addition to this, we developed a WYSIWYW (What 
You See Is What You Want) tool to build mind maps that automatically 
DIDAMATICA 2011 
 
generates a set of slides. These slides are clean and slim, in the sense that 
they are the result of a methodical process of reasoning, thus they only contain 
relevant information. 
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: in Sec.2 we present 
mind maps and we detail our approach for making slides; in Sec.3 we present 
our tool and the design principles surrounding its development; in Sec.4 we 
conclude and outline future directions. 
2. Making Slides out of Mind Maps 
Mind maps, first proposed by Buzan in 1970, are diagrams used to represent 
ideas and information and arrange them around a central concept [Buzan and 
Buzan, 1997]. The elements of a mind map are organized according to the 
importance of the concepts, and are classified into branches, with the goal of 
showing the connections between pieces of information. 
Efficacy of mind maps has been investigated in the educational field and 
they are successfully applied to various disciplines. For instance, they have 
been used in Executive MBA programs [Mento et al, 1999] for business case 
teaching, where students are required to collect, interpret, and communicate 
large quantities of complex information, or in medicine [Farrand et al, 2002] to 
help students to improve factual recall from written information. Moreover, 
[Brinkmann, 2003] pointed out that mind maps are also useful for teachers, who 
can use them as a pedagogical tool helping, among other things, to organize 
information and to meaningfully connect new information with existing 
knowledge. 
Many of the benefits of using mind maps derive from their graphical 
representation which makes it possible to easily add and, especially when using 
computer-aided tools, reorganize concepts. In this paper we apply mind maps 
to the field of studying, though not directly as the above mentioned works, but 
rather as a tool to create presentations. To some extent, mind maps are our 
answer to the problem of how to create effective presentations. A similar use of 
mind maps has already been proposed by [Holman et al, 2006]. They still rely 
on classical tools such as PowerPoint to create a set of slides, but they sort 
them using a mind map, thus introducing a spatial representation of the 
progress of the presentation which contributes to increase the quantity of 
information which is retained by the audience. 
The slim approach is similar, but makes mind maps central to the creation of 
the whole presentation, including the content of each individual slide. As 
Holman et al., we start from the title of the presentation as key concept, we 
arrange sections around it, then subsections and slides. Next we increase the 
depth of the map, by adding elements that represent the content of each slide, 
which is usually organized in items and subitems. Finally, we also support other 
graphical objects, such as images or blocks (e.g., for definitions or examples). 
We identified two main phases while creating a presentation: in the first one, 
the concepts are organized and sorted, while in the second one the graphical 
layout of each slide is arranged (this includes adding images or performing 
small changes in the content, for instance to avoid overly long sentences). 
Slides for teaching: the slim approach 
 
These phases are cyclically repeated while updating the content of a 
presentation (consider for instance course material that is revised each year). 
Our approach stresses the importance of the first phase, thus the use of mind 
maps as tools to structure information. 
As an example, consider the case where a user defined a slide with some 
items and then realized that each item deserved more attention. With our 
approach, by simply moving the item to a higher hierarchy level, the slide 
becomes a subsection and each item is converted into a slide. Using a 
computer program for editing mind maps, this task can be accomplished with a 
drag-and-drop operation, while ordinary tools for presentations lack this 
possibility as they are not designed to assist the user in the process of 
reorganizing the information. 
3. Making Slides with sli-m.com 
Our approach would not be complete without a tool that supports the user in 
building a mind map and capable of automatically generating slides from it. To 
this aim, we developed the sli-m (slide machine), a web application publicly 
available at www.sli-m.com. The guiding principle in the development of this 
application is the use of open formats and standards, and we plan to make the 
whole code open source shortly. Following this principle, any presentation 
created with sli-m is public by default and released with Creative Commons 
license (but the owner can of course make it private if she so wishes). 
The core of the sli-m is built around Freemind, an open source tool for 
building mind maps. As Freemind stores mind maps in a XML format, we 
created an XSLT stylesheet to transform maps into presentations. We chose 
LaTeX/Beamer as final format as it fits our WYSIWYW approach and already 
provides a number of interesting features, including automatic sectioning, 
creation of tables of contents and different themes and colours. 
In addition to this, our application offers a web interface, that allows the 
building of a mind map and provides a live preview of the active slide. The live 
preview (that can be resized, closed or detached in a separate window) is 
particularly useful when most of the presentation is already structured, and the 
author needs to turn to the layout of each slide. 
A web application rather than a standard application was developed 
because it is platform independent, pervasive (currently, sli-m is hosted on 
Amazon EC2 cloud) and needs no configuration or upgrade by the user. 
Furthermore, thanks to the fact that it is a web application, it can be easily 
extended to facilitate collaboration between users. 
The WYSIWYW approach that characterizes the sli-m mitigates many 
inconsistencies in style, such as non-coherent colours, different font sizes and 
misaligned bullet points. 
DIDAMATICA 2011 
 
4. Conclusions 
We have presented a new approach for making presentations based on 
mind maps and the sli-m (slide machine), a web application that implements 
this idea. 
The tool is at an early stage of development, and many features are yet to 
be implemented. To mention a few, we would like to support the OASIS Open 
Document format as an alternative to LaTeX/Beamer, to improve collaboration 
by allowing users to share (parts of) presentations and to introduce support for 
creation and updating of multilingual slides. 
The web site also requires improvements: by exploiting the new features of 
HTML5, we would like to let users work in off-line mode as well as with their 
mobile devices, and more in general we plan to design the application in such a 
way as to facilitate the integration with existing web portals, for instance           
e-Learning platforms. 
Bibliography 
[Bartsch and Cobern, 2003] Bartsch R. A., Cobern K. M., Effectiveness of 
PowerPoint presentations in lectures. Computers & Education, 21, 2003, 77-86. 
[Brinkmann, 2003] Brinkmann A., Mind mapping as a tool in mathematics education. 
Mathematics Teacher, 96, 02, 2003, 96-101. 
[Buzan and Buzan, 1997] Buzan T., Buzan B., The Mind Map Book, BBC Books, 
London, 1997. 
[Farrand et al, 2002] Farrand P., Hussain F., Hennessy E., The efficacy of the    
‘mind map’ study technique. Medical Education, 36, 2002, 426-431. 
[Holman et al, 2006] Holman D., Stojadinovic P., Karrer T., Borchers J., Fly: an 
organic presentation tool, in Olson G. (eds) Proc. of CHI '06 extended abstracts on 
Human factors in computing systems, Montréal, Québec, ACM, New York, 2006,       
863-868. 
[Mento et al, 1999] Mento A. J., Martinelli P., Jones R. M., Mind mapping in executive 
education: applications and outcomes. Journal of Management Development, 18, 4, 
1999, 390-416. 
[Parker et al, 2008] Parker R. E., Bianchi A., Cheah T. Y., Perceptions of instructional 
technology: Factors of influence and anticipated consequences. Educational  
Technology & Society, 11, 2008, 274-293. 


Effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations in lectures.

Fly: an organic presentation tool,

Mind mapping as a tool in mathematics education.

Mind mapping in executive education: applications and outcomes.

Perceptions of instructional technology: Factors of influence and anticipated consequences.

The efficacy of the ‘mind map’ study technique.

The Mind Map Book,

Slides for teaching: the SLIM approach

Slides for teaching: the SLIM approach

Abstract

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