PowerPoint makes you stupid
I've long had a love / hate (mostly hate) relationship with that most ubiquitous of presentation tools, Microsoft PowerPoint. It has nothing to do with it being an M$ product, either - I actually like the Office suite, and when I've tried alternatives I've found them seriously wanting. However, as a former corporate drone and now as an educator, I've had to come to grips with PPT and find a way to use it that works for me, because frankly, the way other people were using it drove me f****** batshit crazy.
Consider this scene in a college lecture hall - a professor stands in the darkened room, giving a lecture that is being mirrored word for word behind her on slide after slide, punctuated by the occasional animated clip-art critter or distracting transition with sound effects (say, tires screeching as the slide whips off-screen to be replaced by another bullet-point nightmare). Titles are bouncing in and out, images are spinning like newspaper headlines in a Frank Capra movie, and you have long-since quit paying attention to any of it, because why should you? You've got the whole thing in the familiar three-slides-to-a-page handout form, complete with note-taking sections, wherein you are drawing pictures of men with donkey heads.
I've sat through HR orientations, law school lectures, and student presentations that all went just that way. As this article the Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald confirms, this is a terrible way to deliver information. Your brain wants its feed spoken or written, but not both at the same time. While I was in grad school, I read an article by Edward Tufte about the ill effects of the PowerPoint. He argues, and I completely agree, that PowerPoint "elevates format over content."
When I teach classes or give presentations, I use PPT - people expect it, and they seem kind of lost when they don't have a big screen to look at. My slides, though, contain very little text. I tend to speak extemporaneously, and I use the slides as prompts - here's the topic, here's a few main points, here's a graph or an illustration of some kind. The slides keep me on track, forming a loose framework, but I might go for several minutes on a single slide. I keep the colors neutral, I avoid sound effects, and the font is usually Helvetica, or maybe Trebuchet MS. I make handouts, but I usually create them from my notes, as there's not enough actual information on the PPT slides to make them worth printing
Consider this scene in a college lecture hall - a professor stands in the darkened room, giving a lecture that is being mirrored word for word behind her on slide after slide, punctuated by the occasional animated clip-art critter or distracting transition with sound effects (say, tires screeching as the slide whips off-screen to be replaced by another bullet-point nightmare). Titles are bouncing in and out, images are spinning like newspaper headlines in a Frank Capra movie, and you have long-since quit paying attention to any of it, because why should you? You've got the whole thing in the familiar three-slides-to-a-page handout form, complete with note-taking sections, wherein you are drawing pictures of men with donkey heads.
I've sat through HR orientations, law school lectures, and student presentations that all went just that way. As this article the Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald confirms, this is a terrible way to deliver information. Your brain wants its feed spoken or written, but not both at the same time. While I was in grad school, I read an article by Edward Tufte about the ill effects of the PowerPoint. He argues, and I completely agree, that PowerPoint "elevates format over content."
When I teach classes or give presentations, I use PPT - people expect it, and they seem kind of lost when they don't have a big screen to look at. My slides, though, contain very little text. I tend to speak extemporaneously, and I use the slides as prompts - here's the topic, here's a few main points, here's a graph or an illustration of some kind. The slides keep me on track, forming a loose framework, but I might go for several minutes on a single slide. I keep the colors neutral, I avoid sound effects, and the font is usually Helvetica, or maybe Trebuchet MS. I make handouts, but I usually create them from my notes, as there's not enough actual information on the PPT slides to make them worth printing
posted by tay0 at 10:42
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