A nice rant against powerpoint

[f4f3]

This:

http://www.greg-brooks.com/000005.html

and the link to a Wired article, say a lot about what I hate most about Powerpoint. I'm in the middle of responding to a request for a FIVE HOUR presentation, and fighting to get it made into a workshop instead. The attitude seems to be that you must use PP and you must have lots and lots and lots of slides.

Comments

[morgaine-x.livejournal.com]

A five hour presentation - whether as presenter or attendee -would cause me to lose the will to live.

[itchyfidget.livejournal.com]

I forgot to make this point in my other comment. Nobody needs a presentation that lasts five hours. Why not issue it as a document for people to read before they come to a two-hour workshop?

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the customer has given us 5 hours - no one says we need to use them all.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I'm refusing to do it - either we do it as a workshop, or at 3 o'clock we tell them we're off down the pub and invite them to join us...

[itchyfidget.livejournal.com]

Excellent :)

[itchyfidget.livejournal.com]

Interesting articles, thanks. I find PowerPoint quite useful as a teaching aid, but it's not without its problems. On the one hand, it summarises the main content, and it's common - though not ubiquitous, for me or colleagues - practice to give students copies of the slides as handouts. In this way, they don't spend the lecture copying down everything, but rather as I talk through the points on the slide (nobody should just read them out!), they can take additional notes as they see fit. On the other hand, it's a tool that promotes a good deal of passivity among students (something that's a problem anyway even before they get into the room).

Naturally it's useful to be able to illustrate lectures about the brain with diagrams of the brain. Or, indeed, anything that needs illustrating. I have to be honest and say that it also acts as a prompt for me, to remind me of content to include but also to preserve the structure of the lecture so that it makes most sense and I don't just ramble like a fool.

Hmm. It occurs to me that my favourite lectures are those where I have lots of room to ramble like a fool :)

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I'm a graduate from a course where lectures were very informationally dense - I'd say chalk and talk, except there wasn't a lot of chalking - and we were expected to research out from that. I don't think Powerpoint is the right medium for getting a lot of info across - you're right when you say that you should give them something to read first (in our case a 150 page proposal). I'll be trying to turn this into a workshop.

[itchyfidget.livejournal.com]

If I'm reading you right, I think you're implying that presenting information by talking is less likely to suggest that this material is the be-all and end-all on the subject than if you present it visually. I'm not sure what I think about that (beyond saying that some people prefer to take in information in different ways, and I do believe in catering to a variety of learning styles).

I will say that even our seminars (= tutorials) have nearly entirely abandoned the assumption that students will do the reading, since when two people out of the six who turn up (from a class of 15) have done the reading and the other four haven't, it makes for such a crap learning experience all 'round (half an hour recapping the material, or reading it, in some cases; I am sufficiently pleased when students turn up to these things at all that I don't believe in sending them away) that it's not worth pursuing. I can't begin to think about what it would be like lecturing to students on the assumption that they knew a little about the area already.

I think of this as being partly due to today's conveyor-belt of young people into higher education, but also because we are a mediocre institution that does not attract many of the brightest/most motivated. The rest are accustomed, from school, to being spoonfed.

[pshtaku.livejournal.com]

Most of my recent professional career has been in an environment where we didn't have very easy access to projectors - and so if you wanted to present to someone, it was a case of chalk & talk... I used to have my own printing whiteboard that I would drag with me to meetings... I did become very adept at drawing out the architecture!

Then more recently (i.e last 6 months) had environment where most mtg rooms had projectors - therefore there was a tendency to use powerpoint. I did notice that my presentations tended to be - a title slide, some slides with diagrams that I didn't want to have draw again & again, and that was just about it...

My colleagues on the other hand were very adept at designing multipage presentations whereby they read out *all* the words on the slides...

I always felt this was very condescending to the audience as it was like saying - you lot can't read, so I'm going to read it for you....