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PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
jpatokal writes "The New York Times confirms what we've suspected all along: PowerPoint makes you dumb. In a new essay, information theorist Edward Tufte outlines why PowerPoint 'forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension.' The Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA agrees, noting that the slides produced by engineers to report on the wing damage were so confusing that 'a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.'" Tufte's essay (and the shuttle/PowerPoint critique) has been available for sale since earlier this year, but the NYT article gives a greater sampling of its content than Tufte's website does.
It's a people problem. I do and watch scientific presentations as a part of my job and I am constantly appalled at the low quality of presentations.
There are few simple rules on how to make a good presentation: 1) Use a projector - stop using transparencies, 2) avoid text on your slides at all costs 3) use plenty of full colour figures and simple animation but don't overdo it and 4) rehearse your presentation so that you know it by heart - nothing irritates me as much as someone who just reads his slides to the audience.
The owls are not what they seem
Is it that PowerPoint makes us stupid, or that only the stupid use PowerPoint?
The answer, as usual, lies between - - it's that the tool provides an outlet for the stupidity that lies within us all.
Some of us, aware that we live in a Dilbertesque world, shake our heads sadly at the spectacle of a comrade droning through the narration of their cookie-cutter presentation, hunched over their laptop in the back corner of the room while the rest of us try valiantly to stay awake in the dimly lit conference room. After it's over, a still-conscious VP nudges the CEO to let him know that it's time to move to the next agenda item. The CEO nods, says "thank-you for that, uh, insightful look at blah-blah-blah," and the presenter wonders whether she's on step closer to the executive suite.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Such presentations are very simular to TV news. If you ask people after watching a TV news broadcast, they in general answer that they feel informed. But if you ask them about what was in the newscast, they remember very little.
PowerPoint presentations have the same effect, they give the subjective impression of being informative, but the audience learn very little from them.
Your advice are fine if you want to be popular. If you'd rather want to be informative, here are some better advice:
- Blackboards rule, if have the skills. But they require a lot of the teacher in organization talent, multitasking, and handwriting. For most people, transparents are better. Handwritten is best, if you can write so everybody can read it.
- The basis should be the oral presentation, the slides should support it by providing structure. This mean they should be mostly text, but not much. A good slide has 5 plus/minus 2 bullets (yes, it is cliche, but it works), each containing 1-3 words highliting a point in your presentation. Never complete sentenses, they are an aid to your oral presentation, not a replacement for it. Using handwritting helps avoid overloading the slides.
- A bit of carfully chosen color is fine. Avoid animations at all cost. Some topics will need diagrams, but remember, you can not actually present raw data in this form, only the conclusions and highlights. Keep the diagrams few, and if you have any drwaing skills, prefer handdrawn diagrams.
- You will obviously need to know what information you want to get across, and you should attempt the presentation at least once. But do not learn it by rote, unless you are an actor or other professional. For most people, a bit of improvision on the spot makes the presentation feel more alive to the audience.
Of course, if your job depends on a positive evaluation from the audience, or you are doing this as part of an entertainment gig, follow the other guys advice. The audience will feel entertained, and give you high marks (or suggest friend to hire you). My advice only pertain to the, perhaps rare, case when you have some information it is important to you to deliver to your audience.The real problem with PPT is that it's a crutch for people who don't know how to present information. A presenation should have two components, at least: the speech, or text, and the visual data. The visual data should illuminate ideas and expand on data.
Consider a news article that has a few accompanying images or a chart. The visuals are a very small part, perhaps 5%. The text contains the information.
Steve Jobs is an excellent of a presenter who knows that the slide show is just the show behind him. He will put up a slide with a single word on it, and then speak about that for five minutes. The slideshow isn't the important thing, it's a very minor component. Or, consider Jack Ryan's presentation in Hunt for Red October.
"A picture is worth a thousand words" should be understood as 'A picture needs a thousand words.'
Unfortunately, too many presenters have gotten it backwards. They try to put all their ideas on screen, relying on the visuals to speak for them. And then they learn that they have to reduce the information on-screen (word-wise at least), but they don't learn to shift the extracted information to their mouth (or accompanying texts).
The potato it is uninformed.
I am one of those educators that does teach PowerPoint. I was forced. I used to teach a Multimedia course that was actually fun. We used Hyperstudio as a base, and I had the time to teach them a little Photoshop, Illustrator, and SoundEdit when they needed those tools to make things better.
Then middle management came along and decreed that Thou Shalt use PowerPoint as it is what the Real World uses. They also decreed that I would integrate presentation topics with the academic teacher's classes to inject a little "reality" into my eighth grader's lives.
Now I have to teach wretched PowerPoint and the presentations generally bore me to tears. Plus with MM looking at me all the time I cannot have any fun anymore with other software. There is no time. Lately I have jazzed it up a lot, and the students have gotten better through the use of note cards, but PP still sucks.
I am trying really hard to drive home the important points of presentations, but stupid things like Word f'n Art get in the way.
Scott
What scares me is that the schools are actually teaching and using PowerPoint!
I just got finished with a CIS110 class (it has bored me to tears; the lab instructor spent two weeks instructing us on how to copy files and create folders in windows). The only reason I'm taking this class is because it is a prerequisit for high performance computing (which involves clustering *nix boxes and such).
The last unit in the lab section of the course was power point. Our project was to compare the pros and cons of different websites on the same subject, create a power point presentation, and present it to the class. I was appalled at not only how many people had absolutely ugly and overly complicated slides, but also how many people missed the entire point of the presentation - half the class simply did a little this-is-a-little-about-my-subject presentation, citing a few websites on the last slide. Not only that, but several people stood up there, facing the projector's screen, reading word for word the slides they had written.
It is not my conclusion that powerpoint makes people dumb; it is my conclusion that people are dumb, and giving them powerpoint is like giving a blind man paintbrushes or a digital camera.