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PowerPoint Bad For Learning
cute-boy writes "This article in the Sydney Morning Herald reporting on research done at The University of NSW suggests the use of Microsoft PowerPoint (and similar products) in lectures and meetings actually makes it harder to absorb facts, rather than being a reinforcement of key points."
Is it PowerPoint's fault, or the fault of the Powerpoint creator? I always hate it when someone dumps all the information onto the slide, because it does make it hard to follow along. Whenever I do a presentation, the bullets on my slides are extremely brief, usually no more than 4-5 words. I want people to look at the bullet, see I'm going to be talking about Topic X, and then listen to what I have to say. This allows people to take notes as necessary and it allows them to pay attention to what I'm saying.
I thought it was common knowledge that creating a presentation with brief bullets was the "proper" way to do it. There's no point in even doing a presentation if you're just going to read off the slides, you may as well email it out and not waste people's time.
Oh wait,.......
To better illustrate the point.
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
I've been seeing crappy slideshow presentations longer than computers have been around. Don't get all anti-MS FUD crazy again and start blaming this on MS: the problem is with the presentation format, not the application.
Where's the powerpoint displaying the findings?
Slide 2: Cheese
Slide 3: Conclusion
Thank you, I will now take questions from the audience.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
You will be missed, O bringer of flashy slide transitions and MS animated clip art.
See also: information presentation expert Edward Tufte's essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.
Cool funny t-shirts for geeks, gamers and everyone else
"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. but it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."[1]
2 40499.html
But, we already knew that. How many of us complain when the presentation speaker simply reads the power point slides to us? The best practice is to give short, simple phrases as cues that helps organize the listener's understanding of the presentation, not as a cue card.
[1]: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/04/03/1175366
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.
--Edward Tufte
We've heard the same story before
The original generic sig.
The University of NSFW...? ohh man now that was a powerpoint I wanted to see!
Maybe she had something going there.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The point isn't that PowerPoint is bad, it's in how it's used. The thing they stress in the article is that the PPP and the spoken words should not be exactly the same, basically that the presenter should not simply read their slides. It doesn't mention using the slides as adjuncts to what is spoken, which presumably would be fine assuming the presenter leaves slices of time for the audience to consume the contents of their slides and then mentally switch back to the presenter again. I think that anecdotally most of us are already aware of this fact, presentations where the presentor simply regurgitates their slides tend to be the most boring and least useful (until you figure out that is what they're doing and totally switch mental energies to other things knowing that you can always review the slides later, aka day dreaming).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Whatever happened to the student taking some responsibility for learning the material? The student should read the chapters as assigned. People keep bitching about how bad our education system is and how we should teach a certain way. Perhaps the students have just gotten more lazy (with reinforcement of the parents). So we don't want the students to put forth an effort to learn? I should tailor my lectures to minimize the outside work that Johnny Fratdude has to do? They make some good points in the article on Cognitive Load Theory, but we are putting less and less of the learning responsibility on the students and that, IMHO, is the problem.
In other news, research has shown that eating McDonalds everyday can make someone fat!
Hasn't it been widely known already that it is a bad idea to just read to an audience what is written on the slides?
It is an effective tool if what is written on the slides is a supplement or "checklist" to cue the presenter on the topics rather than being read word for word.
However, this guy isn't decrying the effectiveness of visual aids. We can thank Dimitry Martin for that proof (observe his visual aids when explaining the google/viacom spat: http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/Google_Youtube_Viacom_
-dave
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Seriously, where will I get my requirements documents now? I'm a big fan of large ugly detailed presentations when it's the closest thing I get to an SDLC artifact ;).
http://www.nbc-links.com/powerpoint.html
Looks like you may need to upgrade to Office 2007. Your version of powerpoint seems to be falling behind a bit.
Since no other software out there is as capable as power point (least of all the OSS offerings) for making presentations, logically all presentations done with any software are Bad For Learning.
The solution is to copy by pen straight from the textbook onto the projector roll.
so how are we supposed to give a presentation?
I write a presentation and I get told I use too many words, sum it up take some out and make it shorter and the words bigger. Until it is bullet points, five per page, with pictures. Of course some information will be lost that way. If I do it the way I want to do it, I get a lower grade and people get bored and lose interest in the presentation. The presentation is an important part of some college classes.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Slashdot had a similar story about this some months ago. It also seems that people have difficulties with learning that powerpoint is bad for learning from articles thar say that powerpoint is bad for learning. What is it with powerpoint ? :)
FTFA: "It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented." Well, here's a hint: stop reading from your PowerPoint presentations as if it were a speech. The PPT is to supplement what you're talking about (visual aids, anyone?), not to show to the audience the equivalent of Microsoft Sam "reading" a Word document. This was drilled into me by my CS teachers. For our three seminar classes on the road to my CS degree, you were expected to give lots of presentations, and they needed to last for at least 10 mins. Far too frequently, my colleagues just got up there and read verbatim from what was typed on the PowerPoint slides. One of my CS teacher's solutions was this (after roughly 20 seconds of verbatim reading): "Wait, wait, wait...stop. Just stop. Look, all of us in here know how to read. If you're going to just 'read to us' your presentation, just give us a printout of your PowerPoint slides, and sit down, as you have nothing else to offer and you're wasting our time. Next!" Of course, they got a failing grade for the presentation part of the essay/small thesis and got their feelings hurt. And my opinion? Better in the university than in the boardroom.
When I was starting my own company a few years back I applied for sponsorship to get it going. As part of the interview process they asked applicants to do a 20 minute presentation for the selection board. I wanted the board to understand what I was doing and to realise I knew my stuff so I produced precisely four slides. They were black and white, plain simple text consisting of a single sentence which served as a banner to each of the points I was making along the lines of "what is it?", "who uses it?", "will people buy it?" and "how much?" I simply stated my case for each of these and then opened for questions.
I got the money.
Often presentations are used as a crutch by people who don't really know what they are talking about and if you get them off track they lose their way which is why they prefer to write everything they want to say down and read from it. I have never believed that this approach will be successful in engaging with an audience and it looks like I was right.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
who thinks that most powerpoint presentations are just bad outlines?
In Toastmasters 10 years ago, we had a flurry of short speeches using PowerPoint.
One fellow, working for the Pentagon, said the military had tired of PowerPoint presentations,
where individuals took great effort to produce graphics and sound,
at the opportunity cost of content.
The presentations became more like juveniles showing off their songs and
latest toys.
Large sections of the military then banned much of PowerPoint,
particularly sound and glittering graphics.
I myself continue making presentations with the most difficult
but most thought-out of tools, LaTeX,
which is actually a mathematical book publishing tool.
I am currently working on my second BS after graduating with my first about 13 years ago.
I have become disappointed with what currently passes as teaching in my current university.
Text book publishers now provide to professors a teachers copy of the text book, a program to generate multiple choice tests, and Power Point presentations (poorly written) for the entire text book. Using these 3 tools, anyone can teach any class.
Power Point encourages laziness.
Ha, this why Marketing/Advertising types LOVE powerpoint presentations--they can give a really impressive presentation full of garbage or trumped up info. Afterwards, everyone remembers that they were really impressed, but doesn't remember any details, so they can't check up on it.
Hi-tech snake oil.
Influencing decision making to make a sale. I had no idea people thought it was to be used as a teaching aid.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Graphic and layout design is not easy. Why do you think so many websites look like crap? For the same reason most PowerPoints do: few people have the talent to effectively organize and present information. I've worked on a few publications and have some Photoshop/InDesign classes under my belt. If I must, I can create a decent slideshow that doesn't make people slam their heads against the table in frustration :)
In skilled hands, PowerPoint can be a powerful tool. But it can just as easily ruin a meeting or presentation if the user doesn't know what he's doing...
I often put diagrams made with Visio inside my presentations.
It also helps to understand yourself the point you are making, people usually react more at a picture or a diagram than just bullet points. I also do this because I am not a great speaker so it helps other peeps to just get my point.
The ideal media would be a mix of Powerpoint Visio and Flash (Flash is too complicated to use to do just presentations), and I am not speaking about making funny transitions between slides (for Flash).
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Of course, it has nothing whatsoever with my ability to understand or the ability of the author to communicate, it all the fault of the tool used.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The problem isn't power point. The problem is trying to cram too much into presentations. Using power point is a little like using pie charts, which are also considered bad for communicating data. If you make more than three points, or if you are communicating sincerely new data, you can not use power point or pie charts for presentations. Power point should be considered either a publishing format, so that your attendees have your notes afterwards. Or, only be used for communicating a minimum set of data to people who already understand part of the data. Using 50 page powerpoint presentations, or 50 slices in a pie chart makes for non-communication.
A certain amount of this is bad presentation skills, going through the pages too fast or reading from a script.
However, if you are communicating a concrete set of data to people who do really understand part of the data, pie charts and presentation software are great. But, keep it limited to three points in each. Powerpoint itself is just a symptom of a larger problem. I've written my own presentation program, in about 100 lines of Perl. Not that big of a deal, but has to be used correctly. For example, spedometers could be considered a type of pie chart, and I know of no one arguing their efficiency. The best presenter I hear of, only had one slide.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
Edward Tufte, a professor emeritus of Yale has previously written about the problems of Powerpoint http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-ms g?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1 ,
and gives the example of how the 1986 Challenger explosion could have been prevented if NASA didn't rely so heavily upon it for presentations. In summary it's about how Powerpoint is a poor tool for communication, As opposed to just text, or speech.
I agree, it's not so much the software being inappropriate for its function, but the software being used inappropriately. As a college student my base curriculum has contained several MANDATORY speech classes. These classes have had, as part of the grade, powerpoint based speeches. Previous to these, the points had been gone through with the students, that the powerpoint is simply a background to your speech/ presentation, and not the basis of the presentation. After this class which was technically a freshman, or sophomore level class, I don't know how many times I've had to complete a group project where the slides I've gotten from my other group members, or the presentations I've viewed from other groups, obviously do not follow these mandates.
Rarely is the question asked: "Is our users learning?"
Hmmmm, while i do kinda agree with the powerpoint doing damage, listen to this from the article: "They have also challenged popular teaching methods, suggesting that teachers should focus more on giving students the answers, instead of asking them to solve problems on their own."
So we are supposed to spoon feed knowledge now? Don't let the students think, just tell them the answers. How stupid is that?
Am I the only one who read that as "The university of NSFW" ?
The University of NSFW
I think they have more problems than Powerpoint...
Speaking on behalf of math instructors, there's a reason we use chalkboards.
Pacing.
Writing out your points as you make them forces you to slow down your exposition. This makes it easier for your audience to digest what you're saying, and also gives them time to take notes. Using premade slides or a powerpoint slideshow lets the presenter run unchecked, and the audience tends to zone out rather quickly. I could cover three times the material in a lecture if I used premade slides, but my students would get so little out of it that I might as well have said nothing at all.
This is your brain.
This is your brain on PowerPoi...what was the question again?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Speaking as one who sat under a professor who only used PowerPoint for his differential equations class... allow me to say "DUH!".
The contrast that year was stark. One professor I had was old school and only used the blackboard. We all came out of his class understanding (mostly) what we were taught in lecture. The other only used PowerPoint and we hardly learned anything in his class. We had to do all the learning in office hours.
All PowerPoint allowed him to do was shove more information down our throats in a shorter period of time. More of a brain dump as opposed to actual teaching.
-gb
The article says that what you propose is the wrong way to do Powerpoint. The basic idea is that when people have to read and hear the same thing, they don't take it in. Visuals should be used for things that are visual, not written.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Anybody noticed the irony that in the article there was a picture of the researchers showing their results..using powerpoint?
I myself continue making presentations with the most difficult but most thought-out of tools, LaTeX, which is actually a mathematical book publishing tool.
Prosper has all the glitz you need anyway.
I prefer Steve Ballmer's method of interpretive dance.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
:-)
ISBN : 0961392142
The book is about displaying data visually. Some of his examples are stunning. The chapter on Graphical Excellence pretty much sums it up. If I had to pick just one of his points it would be the following:
"induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else"
If you can produce a graphic that does that then you are better than 99% of Power Point presenters that I have ever seen. You can produce a glitzy presentation that amuses and entertains your audience but if you haven't engaged them in what you are presenting then all you have done is to deprive them of some much needed sleep.
The book is designed to be self-exemplifying. In other words, Tufte is practicing what he preaches. It means that you can learn a lot just by looking at the pictures.
this is the funniest comic on powerpoint ever http://www.cartoonbank.com/product_details.asp?msc ssid=5RR3MU7QG8WL8JLLPPBPJNFBKSW2BEQ7&sitetype=1&d id=4&sid=68259&pid=&keyword=powerpoint§ion=all &title=undefined&whichpage=1&sortBy=popular
Yeah but can you really trust a work-related study from the University of Not Safe for Work?
"and gives the example of how the 1986 Challenger explosion could have been prevented..."
In fact, he gives the example of how the 2003 Columbia explosion might have been prevented. This demonstrates that, PowerPoint aside, it's important to reread material you're about to present to other people. You might have noticed that 1986 was a little early for a PowerPoint presentation.
Go and read through http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/ and especially its manual that comes with the tarball on https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?grou p_id=92412&package_id=97753 .
You will absorb a different way of approaching a presentation, even if you won't use that LaTeX package to create slides.
But typing some by hand might make you a skilled craftsman of that trade...
And for the speaking part, join http://www.toastmasters.org/ !
Its presenting exact same information in the same manner (i.e., the same words) in multiple different formats simultaneously hurts retention. As John Sweller states in TFA:
Of course, anyone who has taken a basic speech class that discusses effective use of visual aids would know that's exactly the wrong use of a visual aid, computerized or otherwise. So, while its interesting research that reveals that what is widely accepted by experts in the field of communication to be a bad practice is actually demonstrably counterproductive to recall rather than merely an annoyance to the audience that isn't an optimum use of resources, its not any kind of particular blow against PowerPoint, presentation software, or visual aids in presentation, just further reinforcement that having an easy-to-use tool to produce and display visual aids doesn't replace understanding how to effectively use them.
As an associate instructor of an intro to computer science course, I can say that whiteboard and marker is the best way to go. Chalkboards are okay except generally a little more messy. Maybe courses like history and what not powerpoint is OK, but its hard for me to explain certain concepts on powerpoint. Plus--if someone asks a question, my powerpoint presentation wont be equipped to handle their question.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPNrbdLEjZk&mode=re lated&search=
ahahaha. Don't try those arm movements at home.
Speaking of Edward Tufte, check out 'The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching out Corrupts Within' for an excellent critique on the misuse of PowerPoint and a primer on the best way to use this tool.
The strength of PowerPoint is the ability to present graphical, audio, or video media in your presentation.
The strength of the presenter is the ability to communicate information to the audience, and via a feedback loop between audience and presenter, tune the presentation to the level of comprehension of the audience.
So use the slides to present information you cannot easily describe verbally.
I'll give you an example. Put your helmets and ballistic eyewear on; war story time:
As part of my junior staff officer course, we had to do up a set of briefing notes and a presentation as if we were presenting an idea to the Brigade Chief of Staff. I had a persistent problem (real world) where I could not get enough radios of the right type to do the job required of me, so I did my presentation on "why you should give me the radios I'm entitled to".
The Bde COS is usually a light Colonel and a very busy man. These sorts of presentations have to be brief, sussinct, and to the point. It is not unheard of for the COS to walk out of a presentation that he thinks is wasting his time.
First slide is a title slide.
Second slide was a picture of each of the types of radio in circulation, annotated with a model number, a theoretical range, and if it was battery powered or ran off the vehicle power bus. The idea here being to make sure that we were on the same page with nomenclature - so when I say "A+ set" I mean "that thing".
Third slide was a picture of a Recce Squadron ORBAT, showing all the vehicles that make up the squadron, color coded as to which get which model of radio "by the book"
Fourth slide was the same picture, but with the vehicles I typically actually brought to the field, color coded with the radios I actually had. The point of this slide is to acknowledge the fact that *nobody* fields the by-the-book ORBAT and so basing your argument on "this is what the book says I'm supposed to have" is a non-starter in the real world.
The next few slides were screencaptures of maps from my Garmin GPS software showing the tracks I followed during a series of field exercises. My GPS is always on during exercises, and it records electronic breadcrumb trails of everywhere I go. Each map was annotated with the location of the command post, the distances at the points of my minimum and maximum distance from the CP, where I did and did not have communications with the CP, and the square km of the AOR I had actually operated in on that exercise. Here I'm showing *actual data from recent exercises* not just theoretical tactics out of the book. The fact that it was recorded off a device, not just anecdotal, gave this part a lot of punch.
The next slide was a graphical representation of the number of batteries I was consuming on a typical 3-day exercise, along with the cost of these batteries (vice not needing them at all if I had the proper vehicle-bus powered radios)
And the final slide summarized the key points. Aside from the title slide, this was the only "text slide".
Not only did I get an A on the presentation for my course, the PowerPoint slides escaped into the wild, and the real live Bde COS got ahold of them. He came out to visit me on the next exercise (where I was able to demonstrate the problem in person) and shortly thereafter, I got the radios.
The key to the success of this presentation is that the slides SHOW information, not TELL information - the "tell" job is for the presenter, not the slides. Do it this way, and the presentation will be effective.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
- Kind of ironic now.
It's not the program, it's the medium. In this case the medium is the screen.
I once had a Calculus prof whose lectures were awful. This was pre-powerpoint: he used transparencies and an overhead projector. All he would do is plop something on the overhead, read it to us, and then plop down the next slide, and repeat.
One day the overhead was broken. Without a blink of an eye he picked up a piece of chalk and began lecturing the old fashioned way, writing down stuff on the blackboard. The prof was transformed from a deadly boring lecturer to an absolutely fascinating speaker. There was much more class interaction and I learned way more in that class than in any previous class.
Next class the overhead was working again. Sigh.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Too bad my mod points have run out... This has to be the funniest thing I've read on here in a long time!
David Patterson has some very good advice on how to give a bad presentation. It assumes low tech (in 1983 all we had were transparent slides), but the spirit of the advice is what counts.
o n.htm
http://www.presentationhelper.co.uk/badpresentati
Presentation Zen. Definitely read their contrast of presentations given by Gates and Jobs. On a personal note, I can proudly say I have never given a presentation with bullet points. I tried hard to give up that crutch and the result has always been commendation afterwards. My audiences have described my presentations as fluid, participatory, and engaging. Avoiding bullet points at least proves you know your material. Also remember that your presentation is there to enhance what you have to say, and not the other way around.
Why bother.
Hey, this means that the bad ppt is a perfect recipe for reporting to management.
I love how the author of this post goes after powerpoint like it's the root of all evil, but leaves software like Apple's Keynote and OpenOffice Impress out of it. Instead, we demonize one thing, and then say "and other products" instead of naming some of them as well.
This needs a new category - TacoFud.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
And now please welcome President Abraham Lincoln.
Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It's great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn't live without it, could we? Oh - is it ready? OK, here we go:
Click here to start
http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
PowerPoint Makes You Dumb: http://slashdot.org/hardware/03/12/14/0422201.shtm l
Um, I'm really hoping the 3-4 items for 3-4 seconds quote did NOT come from John Sweller as that's quite wrong. The magic number in cognitive psychology (even in NSW) is 7±2, which is 5-9 not 3-4. Else without chunking no one could dial a new 7 digit phone number without writing it down. Also, as mentioned (briefly) in the article: rehersal helps people store more items, and sad to say, going through a power point presentation (and you know, lecturing) is rehersal. This is ESPECIALLY true if the same text is on the screen and presented orally. Different information from these two sources would be much worse here though, and then the divided attention becomes a problem.
I'm sure (ok, I hope) his theory has merit, but that write up is incorrect in regards to the assumptions about cognitive theory.
When studying or rewriting lecture notes, I use PowerPoint, treating slides like 3x5 cards.
It's quicker for me, easier to read (lousy penmanship), and easier to review the notes.
Plus, my dog can't eat them.
What?
thats just because people don't know how to make proper powerpoints. The bullet points in a power point should contain actual information, instead of something like...
- Overview
- Vague and General Topic 2
you get my drift...
Microsoft forces those who will be giving public presentations to take a one week training course on doing it right. It was jokingly called 'Touch-Turn-Talk' school, for those of us hired who were not comfortable public speakers. Probably the best career enhancement class I ever took. We were videotaped and able to see along with our classmates the the true extent of our suckage.
At the end of the class, the improvement was amazing.
No company should allow anyone to speak for them without some sort of formal public speaking training. The ROI is immeasureable. Microsoft is not responsible for companies using Powerpoint, anymore than Sears would be if you use your Craftsman wrench to club your wife in the head.
I think this perfectly illustrates the problem with Powerpoint. When you watch a lecture with blackboard and chalk, you actually see the ideas develop on the board (if the lecturer is doing a good job). The lecturer can go back and emphasize certain parts of the text or graph, circle things, even erase parts of equations and change them to something else, you can actually witness the analytical process the lecture is trying to convey. In addition to that, you will actually see the lecturer in person interact with the text, graphics and data, which I believe can greatly help your learning. Powerpoint just isn't good at emulating that sort of stuff, and that's why I never use it. Sometimes I use various LaTeX presentation packages, that make it relatively easy to do things like develop equations and formulas step by step, emphasize selected parts of equations, build graphs and diagrams step by step etc. It's not perfect, but it's definitely better than what you can do with Powerpoint. Paradoxically, even with all the animations, fancy transitions etc, 99.99% of Powerpoint presentations end up being much more static than a good chalkboard lecture.
There is also another thing that I believe is nicely illustrated by your example. Experts on human learning seem to agree that people learn better if the environment in which they study changes. Which means that a lecturer should every once a while change his or her presentation style. Using slides one day and chalkboard another day, perhaps depending on topic that is covered, can definitely help your students to learn. Too many professors have their own routine (I do too, it's just so easy to do that) they follow each lecture. Students then come to the class, make sure that everything is the way it's "supposed to be", and turn off. They make a routine out of it, too. A sudden change as the one you describe can bring them back, break their routine, and precondition (I hate that word here, but I can't think of anything better right now) them for absorbing the material better. Even if the actual delivery on that day isn't any better, at least it wakes some of the students up!
AccountKiller
"Nothing seems to induce brain death quicker than holiday snaps."
Try wedding snaps. I was once subjected to this torture, my eyes still hurt.
The links don't provide any details on how the study was performed or the detailed results. So based on what we know from the links, it's just some guy's opinion.
The worst is when someone in your company "documents" their project with powerpoint slides, and places those slides online as though they mean anything without the presentation at hand. (And no, I don't think having a video of a presentation is adequate documentation either. Yuck.)
If you have a project that needs documenting:
Priority one: real documentation.
Priority two: your presentation.
Priority three: the visual aid.
Three is not sufficient without two; two is not sufficient without one.
During our communication lessons, a professor taught us how to use powerpoint properly:
Use black screens!
Basically, every time you're not presenting a graph/table or whatever visual thing you got, enter a black screen (or press "B" to go black). That way, people aren't tempted to stare at the screen but look at you. During that time, while they focus on you, you can tell your story. So what should be on the ppt aside from the aforementioned graph/table/other visual "object"> a short (bulleted) SUMMARY of what you've just said while they were busy staring at and listening to you.
So in the order of black screen > you tell your story > screen comes up with short summary of what you just said > rinse and repeat.
That way, not only will you give information without your viewers "multitasking" (read being confused) by both staring at the screen, reading the text while listening but not looking at you. It also puts more significance in the speaker: rather than being an extension of the powerpoint pres, the powerpoint pres is really there to support the speaker.
Takes a lot more practice though, because you really need to tell your story, without them being able to read it, so you need to present it properly, and then use points that sum up that story well to really etch the information into the viewer's brains.
All the business professors at my college tend to use it these days, because they are too lazy to create a real scripture. For people like me who need to read a detailed text calmly at home to understand certain parts this is just ugly.
I was just studying Neural Networks and when today saw this theory here, thought they both share some resemblance
There's nothing you list off that can't be done on a simple web page. When I was in grad school, I was a contrarian, and absolutely refused to use PowerPoint at all for class presentations. I used a web browser, reading local files. And you know, it worked fine. In fact, sometimes it worked a lot better.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
More times than not the development of the slides devolves down into avoiding certain areas where the authors understanding of the subject matter is weak and reiterating bullet points where understanding is strong. Its sort of used as a shiny thing "Hey, look over here!". Its used as a tool to beat the audience over the head so as not to have much of a discussion with them.
However I have seen decent presentations where it was used to emphasize discusion points with real data, sighting real sources, and not used as a discusion script.
In the end, slides are usually used to obvuscate information, rather than provide any.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Maybe it's just habit, but my problem with powerpoint based lectures is that the presence of the slide printouts actually discourage notetaking. What's the point of taking notes, when you have the presentation right there? Sure someone is going to suggest that you're supposed to take notes on what is being said, but frankly what's being said rarely deviates from the slide text in any meaningful way. So you're sitting there passively listening.
Now compare this with a traditional blackboard lecture. The lecturer reads from his notes and writes down the main points. The audience then copies these notes down. The act of writing down the text forces you to think about it. The physical action reinforces the information. Without that, it's harder to remember the lecture later.
We use powerpoint for 3 of my 5 classes this semester. Last semester, I believe it was 4 out of 5. For all of my classes that use powerpoint, the instructors make the presentation files available before class so we can print them off.
A powerpoint presentation that is well done is much MUCH better than a presentation with overhead transparency sheets, let alone a poorly done powerpoint presentation. Honestly, would you rather be copying down a graph and miss all the information that the instructor is talking about, or be able to mark up comments on the graph as you're following along with what the instructor is talking about? Basically, what we do for all of my business school classes is have the powerpoint presentations as outlines, like what you would expect if you went to a meeting.
What really sucks about slideshows are the idiots who try to cram 3 chapters in 6 pt font on a single slide, then read the damned slide to you.
What's the point of taking notes
What's the point of taking notes, period? Pay attention, prepare for the damned class by skimming over the material. Then pay attention during class - you might get a better insight into stuff you didn't quite understand in your preview. Then try to remember the important stuff, and after class then LOOK IT UP in books/trade magazines. Talk about what you are learning with your friends, try to quiz each other verbally, and try to explain things to each other. 70% of what you hear in a lecture is just fluff anyway. The real trick is learning to distinguish between the important stuff and the waffle.
Note taking is silly because it reduces your ability to pay attention - and it encourages the dangerous habit of studying your notes instead of studying the actual concepts/material. Depending on your field most of your notes may be obsolete by the time you graduate anyway.
Hey, but I only consistently finish in the 98th percentile of courses and/or standardized national tests, just ignore me.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Most people can't create good presentations.
(I know I'm not the first to put this comment here; the real reason I'm commenting is that I want to describe how I make PowerPoint presentations...)
I do a lot of technical presentations. I imagine that I am explaining the topic to someone interactively using a white board (which is always very effective). Then I just make slides containing a cleaned up (and often animated) version of what I would have put on that white board. No whole-paragraph bullet points or long blocks of text.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
My wife does a lot of public speaking and has training in it, so I have some idea what I'm talking about, but I probably won't present it quite right. Anyhow, it is considered very bad to write presentations where the slides contain anything you're going to say. Even titles are something you should avoid speaking. Rather, slides should be there exclusively to present context and visual aids that are hard or impossible to present through the speech. For instance, if I'm talking about the Ruby programming language, I'll speak things that describe concepts and show code snippets and diagrams on the slides that illustrate them in a different way.
PowerPoint presentations aren't fundamentally bad. Rather, many PowerPoint presentations are bad.
John Swelly says "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched." I understand his problem with PowerPoint but absolute statements like this, in today's bullet point world, are not good. There are teachers using PowerPoint creatively and effectively. Instead of throwing out the tool, the proper educational practice should be to examine what's good and bad and improve how we use the tool. You can integrate video content into PowerPoint. My district (Pasco County, FL) has a license with unitedstreaming, a huge online warehouse of educational video clips. To bring a quicktime video into a PowerPoint slide on our computers (Macs,) you simply click and drag it. PowerPoint can combine sound, graphics, animation, text, and video to make compelling presentations. Let's toss the whole thing because most people don't use it properly! Let's NOT. If we adopt that strategy, we need to toss all of our computers too. The way to progress is to define goals and start moving toward them.
Music - www.richardmac.com
"They have also challenged popular teaching methods, suggesting that teachers should focus more on giving students the answers, instead of asking them to solve problems on their own." No justification given for that comment. Sure, the kids will get the answers correct more often (after all, you just told them the answers). School isn't just about passing those GCSEs (UK people will know that they have nothing to do with raw intelligence, its a matter of listening to the "correct" answer and regurgitating it on paper, they're there to teach you to think through a problem.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
For an example of how to do slides right, watch one of Steve Jobs' keynote addresses.
disclaimer: they are made with apple's "keynote" software, which is very excellent.
They can research all they want, but everyone knows how to make a powerpoint presentation *ahem* "memorable"...
Narrator: that's when you'll catch a flash of Tyler's contribution to the film.
[the audience is watching the film, the pornography flashes for a split second]
Narrator: Nobody knows that they saw it, but they did...
Tyler Durden: A nice, big, cock...
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
The only thing "bad" about MS PowerPoint is that making a 20-page presentation becomes SO easy that people, that where as before, complete reports and thorough analysis were created BEFORE they were distilled into presentations, now you have people just slamming things onto PowerPoint as facts are discovered and thoughts cross the mind. No matter what the medium is (transparency projected onto walls, sleek PowerPoint with all sorts of bells and whistles), a sloppy presentation is just that -- waste of audience's time.
I've been creating more than my fair share of PowerPoint slides in my 8 years as an IT/management consultant, and I've heard and tried probably all the rules and best practices on PowerPoint. What's important at the end, I believe, is that the PowerPoint captures the true "take aways" from whatever point you want to get across in a concise and logical package, and that the details should always be provided in a separate artifact, usually a well-written report that provides details to the "take aways." Executives will appreciate the take aways, and their underlings will be happy to that they have something to troll through.
Badly developed, and poorly delivered PowerPoints defintely are deterrents, but it's how you use the tool, not the tool itself, that is to blame.
More advice from Dave Messerschmitt.
Re: PP, I agree with some other posts I've seen here that PP can be used badly or well. Most of the aweful PP talks I've seen would have been just as bad (and possibly worse) with another technology.
That said, it's not as though all tools for a given task are equivalent. I'm a lot more likely to make a long straight cut using a table saw with a guide than I am using a hand saw without a guide (and possibly even with).
In this regard, I don't think PP is nearly as bad an offender as MS Word, because Word makes it far too easy to do bad things, like ignore styles, and hard to do good things, like use styles instead of one-off formatting. (In fairness, it seems to be improving, but is still a far cry from, say, FrameMaker from 1992.)
Leaving aside for the moment what you personally think of it (please!), in this case what is going on is often an in depth exegesis and analysis of the text itself, often with great emphasis on the words used, conjunctions and so forth. I would think this would fall into a somewhat different category.
... not about presentations made to peers. Good teaching in a classroom and good communication in a meeting between peers require some of the same skills, but also some very different ones. What makes a presentation to colleagues effective is a related topic, but it is not the same thing. An effective presentation made to colleagues could be a terrible classroom lesson for students. There is more on the specific research findings here.
The act of writing down the text forces you to think about it.
Maybe for you, but it's just a distraction for me. Not having to take notes is a big help.
Finally one day a student asked why this professor never posted the material online the day before or soon after the lecture is done. To which he replied "It was unfair to the students who didn't come to the lecture". We looked at each other aghast and puzzled as to why he would say something that was so illogical. When another student asked to clarify he got defensive. In fact if he thought if your programming method was not exactly the way he envisioned it, you were trying to cut corners or in his words "cheat". Which is offensive because we were not trying to cheat, but come up with the best solution we knew how based on the course material and the text book. Needless to say if I had that red headed dweeb of a professor today I would have slapped some sense into the little insecure man.
Powerpoint has it's place, but students can't absorb slides flipping through that fast unless they have their own elecrtonic copy or printed handout to follow from. My 2 cents.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I've always found that I understand and retain information better when it is simultaneously presented in slightly out of sync audio and visual formats (* but only if it's presented slowly enough for me to follow both).
Back in elementary school through high school, many of my teachers would give a lecture facing the chalk board. They would say the main point and then write it down. Months later I could still recall key lectures in vivid detail. It felt like I was cheating because I could just play back the lecture during an exam. However in college (*early admissions), my professors started writing and speaking too fast for me to follow, and I lost the ability to mentally record lectures almost over night. I could still recall fragments of lectures but never in the crisp detail of previous years.
TFA specifically mentions reading along with Bible passages. I know I'm in a minority on this point here on Slashdot, but when I'm at church and I listen to the pastor reading from the Bible, I prefer to follow along in a different translation because I don't focus on just one version and take it at literal face value. Instead, correlating the differences gives me a better understanding of the underlying message, and I feel like that's much more valuable than simply listening or reading alone.
Similarly, I enjoy seeing subtitles that don't match the on-screen dialog. It gives me a better sense of the story because I'm getting tidbits of information from the original script that didn't make the final cut.
Yes, no doubt about it, a really good speaker or teacher can do much better with a piece of chalk than with a slide show, and it just helps attention spans enormously to see someone actually making a physical effort to communicate. On the other hand, the ubiquity of slideware (and let's face it, >95% Powerpoint) has made poor and mediocre speakers more effective than they would be otherwise. But I find if you ask students, they really want and expect slideshows these days. Do it the old-fashioned way, which takes 3 times the effort, and you'll be derided if not lambasted. That being the case, the question is perhaps, why they need us (teachers) at all. Why not just give an automated slide show, with an automated pointer and the World's-Greatest-Lecturer on that particular subject doing the audio?
Their findings completely fail to take into account multiple learning styles. People have a mix of learning styles. For most of us, we absorb information most easily when we get it in auditory or visual form - heard or read. There are also kinesthetic learners and cognitive learners - people who don't learn unless they're moving, or don't learn unless they're figuring it out for themselves. Anyone who's tried to teach a fidgetter should know that asking them to sit still shuts down their brain from absorbing information. Every person has their own unique mix of these styles.
People who are heavy visual learners will tune out what the speaker is saying and just read what's on it. Most of the stuff that the speaker is saying is near insensible anyway because those paths aren't very good at absorption. For heavy auditory learners, you could have almost anything on the slide, but it wouldn't matter unless the speaker described it. The power point isn't redundant to the speaker, it's a backup, in case the audience contains heavy visual/poor auditory learners.
The best teachers in the industry also include segments where they have their students moving physically about the classroom. One well-known teacher of teachers has an example where he gets across the difference between parallel and serial by having the students line up and walk across a line, and then walk across the line in groups. The idea behind exercises is to appeal to the cognitive learners.
It's fine for people to say that it clogs the pathways when you try to absorb things through two channels at once, but for most of us it's an either/or, where we pick the one that best suits us.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
I think their research may apply to some people but not all. I myself find it easier to remember and comprehend material if something is written down so I can read along with the speaker. If someone is only speaking to me in lecture, I usually daze out. If I am supposed to read something, I usually fall asleep. For example, it is always easier for me to pay attention in group readings if I have the book in front of me to follow along.
Also, I think students solving their own problems is more effective than teachers giving the answer. Having to solve the problem by yourself helps you to remember how to solve it later.
The problem is, learning about some new phone doesn't exactly require much intellectual effort on the part of the audience. I really don't think that's the sort of thing that this study is referring to.
Jobs is a salesman and Gates a geek.
7) If it is possible to cut a word/bullet/slide out, always cut it out.
8) Obviously, the parent post breaks points 1-6 -- so break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Not really.
Personally, I don't like the 4-word bullet point style very much, either. When I see a slide that just has a few bullet points on it, my question is "why bother?" You can just say what's on the slide, keep the attention focused on you as the presenter, and save a slide. This idea that all information should be duplicated and presented both on the slide and in the oral presentation is the problem, IMO.
If you try to give the same information in both places then people tend to pay attention to neither, or they get distracted comparing one to the other.
When I present, I make it clear that the major channel for the conveyance of information is my voice, and what I'm saying; the slides are just there to back it up with things that would be too much of a PITA to describe (graphs, data tables, diagrams/flowcharts).
I think the key concept is that the Powerpoint presentation doesn't, and shouldn't, be able to stand on its own. If you can hand someone your Powerpoint deck and they basically get all the same information as they'd get by listening to you talk, then you might as well just email everyone the PP slides and save everyone's time. There's no reason why someone should look at the Powerpoint and see anything that makes sense -- after all, it's just the visuals that were supposed to accompany a presentation, not the presentation itself. (In many cases, I think the driving force behind this is laziness: people, particularly some junior college professors that I've met, don't want to do both visuals and handouts, so they just make terrible visual aids and print them out as handouts.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I have serious issues with the conclusions of the researchers discussed in the article.
Their conclusions do not fit my own personal experiences or what I was taught in my graduate level courses on pedagogical methods at all. Also, I don't think that pictures are much different from written information, since reading words and interpreting a graph both require processing visual information. Graphs and diagrams are also useless without legends and axis labels written out in words, so you can't avoid the written word by just showing graphs and diagrams on slides.
When I was a student, I found that I got absolutely nothing out of lectures if I just sat there and passively listened to a speaker. I got more out of lectures when I took notes. Passive listening increased the likelihood that I would zone out or fall asleep in the middle of the lecture, particularly when I was tired from staying up until 2:00 am to finish my quantum mechanics homework. Of course, what I got out of my notes and the lecture depended a lot on how well the material was presented. If the professor was not organized, was difficult to hear, had really bad chalkboard skills, and went too fast, I got very little out of the lecture even if I tried to take notes.
Okay, so when I was in college, we still used chalkboards. However, I have the same problems with PowerPoint talks. If I sit there in the dark and listen passively during PowerPoint presentations at meetings or conferences I get absolutely nothing out of the presentation. I've found I retain more when I try to be a more active listener by taking notes and asking questions, but the speaker needs to go slowly enough for me to keep up with him or her.
I also have found that when I study material on my own, I need to reinforce what I am learning by speaking or taking notes. When I took French in college, I learned new vocabulary faster by saying the words out loud as I read them, or by writing the words down while I spoke them. When I read technical articles, I actually need to write down notes on a piece of paper (or type on a computer) as I read or I will not retain any information from the article at all. I think this is the same problem I had in lectures, only in this case, I need to be an active reader, rather than an active listener. I know some people like to use highlighters to mark up their textbooks or articles. This does absolutely nothing for me, as it is still passive reading. I need to summarize everything into my own words in order to retain the information, whether I am reading articles and textbooks, or listening to a lecture.
I honestly do not think the problem with PowerPoint presentations is that they provide too much information and that people inherently have difficulties processing information simultaneously in visual and oral formats. I think the real issue is that people have different learning styles and not everyone learns best through the same classroom or presentation techniques. I don't think that most people have a good sense of self-awareness when it comes to knowing how they really learn best. I found that I actually became a better student after taking courses in pedagogical methods, since I gained a new understanding of why my instructors planned their courses the way they did.
Studying pedagogical methods also helped me find ways to overcome some of the difficulties I had when course material was presented in a manner that did not fit my learning style.
I'm a recent university grad. Some professors chose to use PowerPoint and others did not. Of all the lectures, professional presentations, meetings etc I've attended, Powerpoint was never really the problem. Sure it is if its distracting. The slides aren't to the point. But the best presentations are when presenters challenge the audience's views, are engaging, make accurate statements, and interpret the material correctly. Powerpoint slides don't do this, people do. That's what's missing.
I agree, but there are times when data is better represented visually than described in words.
For example, let's say I need to tell you about a new reorganization that's going to take place. I could stand there and talk about who reports to whom, for twenty minutes, and everyone could sit there trying to figure out how the fuck it all adds up (and probably, trying to draw charts on cocktail napkins or in their notes), and where they are in the whole mess, or I could just put up a flowchart.
You don't want to "talk to" the visual, but having it there behind you keeps the audience from going off into la-la land because they are trying to work out the big picture on their own.
I'm quite adamantly against the "bullet point" style of presentations -- I've maybe in my life seen two people who did it well, and they both used physical 35mm slides with an operator whose job it was to click them on cue, and the presentations had been rehearsed into the ground -- but there's no harm and a lot of gain in using visual aids when the alternative is confusing the audience by trying to describe to them a flowchart or graph that they can't see.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Do you have a PPT of the article?
Whore Yourself... @ http://whorapedia.com/
Half-awake audiences and inadequate preparation on the part of the presenter whose resources simply get dumped in a public repository anyway. Are you trying to defend this practice or provide an example of how not to share information? I would hope it is the latter.
Why bother.
The problem with minimal outlines is that then people have to frantically take notes; I can do this quite easily, as I take notes right in PowerPoint, and type fast (or in Adobe Acrobat Professional, if it's been PDF'ed). This also distracts the focus from learning, if one gets behind.
Here's my idea: dual PowerPoints, one for presentation, one as a detailed reference. Perhaps some way to combine them (nested?) in one powerpoint file, for those viewing on computers (who might want to expand on certain topics).
I had an accounting professor who didn't assign a textbook because his notes were like a textbook. Very detailed. This is convenient for referencing purposes. However, it's less convenient for presentation. The powerpoint for presentation should provide structure to what's being lectured on, and give visuals for things not easily described, or that would be a pain to take notes on.
From the pov of the listener, I think it's always a good idea to record lectures or talks, so that you can listen to them again if you want to.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
What are you talking about? PowerPoint is awesome! Lincoln should have used it for the Gettysburg address!
"'Looking at an already solved problem reduces the working memory load and allows you to learn. It means the next time you come across a problem like that, you have a better chance at solving it,' Professor Sweller said."
Learn what? The answer or the solving process?
Recently, I decided to start experimenting with "alternative" ways to communicate a message in my presentations. The biggest success has been using Mind Mapping software, in this case, Mindjet's MindManager 6 Pro. This is not only a tool/technique to organize your ideas better, but the product has the feature to "present" each one of the items and its branches, making it ideal for bullet-oriented presentations. It's also interesting to note that people tend to pay more attention to you when you are *not* using PowerPoint. They are so used to it than anything different will attract more attention.
I must say that I find the screencasts on Ruby-on-rails (at http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts) probaby among the best presentations I've ever seen, from the perspective of communicating the idea.
NO SHIT!
the powerpoint for this research?
It really irritates me that most of the comments in the discussion of this article have focused on the presenters and why PowerPoint is evil. Being a good listener and paying attention to the material is even more important than the quality of the PowerPoint presentation and the handouts. The slides and handouts don't matter at all if you just don't want to be in a meeting or attending a class.
I recently taught a college level science course that is typically taken by non-science majors to fulfill graduation requirements. The other instructors in our department recommended that I make my PowerPoint slides available on the course web site before the lectures. When I started doing this, I found that about 75% of the class did stopped coming to the lectures. Warning the students that they would miss important material from demonstrations, discussions, and in-class activities if they skipped lectures did not make any difference in attendance. The students who were interested in the course and willing to do the work to earn good grades downloaded the notes, came to the lectures, and participated in class discussions and activities. Unfortunately, most of the students were only taking the class because their academic advisers forced them to take it or because they were expecting an easy "A." These students downloaded the notes, frequently skipped class, did not participate in class discussions, and then complained that their low test scores were due to my bad teaching, not their lack of effort. Making the PowerPoint slides available before a lecture only helps the students who actually want to learn. If the students aren't willing to take an active role in their own learning experience, nothing the instructor does will help them to learn or retain the material presented in class.
The same basic idea applies to business meetings and conferences. If you're not paying attention and being an active listener, then it does not matter whether or not the presenter is a good speaker or uses PowerPoint. Having a copy of the slides beforehand does not matter if you decide to skip the meeting since you already have the notes. It also does not help having the slides ahead of time if you do not study them to prepare for the meeting, or if you just sit there passively listening during the meeting. People learn better and retain more when their minds are actively engaged in a presentation through note-taking or discussions of the material being presented.
The seemingly simple act of passing information along from one person to another, while maintaining the original meaning and information intact, is probably one of the hardest things to do.
I hate PowerPoint as much as the next guy (and possibly more thanks to my last boss), but the biggest problem with this technology is, as usual, the user.
PowerPoint is a fantastic way to provide visual, non-text data with a speech or classroom lecture. One of my degrees is in the fine arts, and I really wish we would have had PowerPoint/something else to enhance the lectures rather than 20 year old slides (with all kinds of color shifts) moving around in projectors that were doomed to fail 2-3 times per lecture.
As some others have said here, how can anyone without effective communications skills be expected to use something like PowerPoint to improve or clarify his message?
Recently, I've begun to see PowerPoint presentations fall off a bit; I think because the oooh-ahhh factor of using the computer has worn off. When I do see it, it's much more multimedia intense with fewer page effects.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
What really sucks about slideshows are the idiots who try to cram 3 chapters in 6 pt font on a single slide, then read the damned slide to you. And even more suck people who don't have those 3 chapters - the slides is all they have. and it encourages the dangerous habit of studying your notes instead of studying the actual concepts/material Scripts aren't about getting the perfect and complete explanation that will fulfill all your knowledge needs for the far future. Scripts are about learning which habitual trivias the professor will ask for in his exam. The advantage of blackboard lectures is usually that you get a full script that will at least let you pass the test. Better than slides which don't even give you an idea that you should even read books.
...And through this all, what bothers me most, is the focus is on the sideline(.ppt) as opposed to the actual core of the research, which hints to the human brain having a sort of swap-file, as well as gauging the approximate capacity of that swap-file.
As far as presentations go, I suggest http://www.presentationzen.com/ as a valuable resource. That's where I first learned about the Takahashi method, which to this day I consider the leading pres system with regards to information-effectiveness and aesthetics.
Microsoft put the "sucks" in "success".
Consider this:
Instructors do not have ANY education experience and almost nothing is provided to teach them how to teach. The only qualification is that they know the topic. This appears to be the traditional way its always been done.
In the past, students consisted of people who wanted to learn who only needed a guide/coach to help them teach themselves the subject matter (this is what I'm told by old timers.) This made college educated people highly valuable; today, everybody goes to college and the majority of students are not like that. The system is still targeting an audience which is now a SMALL minority of the student population.
Surely, you know of people with degrees who are not competent or do not meet expectations in their field of expertise. I bet that the percentage of these graduates has been rising for decades...
I am not blaming anybody. The system is old, the student makeup is new, and expectations of college are inaccurate as well as changing (I'd guess trade schools are still the same.) I see people with CS degrees taking my classes on web design when they should be able to figure it out faster on their own.
When I started, I was given only the last man's slides which were lifted from the textbook about 1 week before classes started. Nothing is provided and they don't care if you read your slides; in part because they are open to any methodology and because they themselves have no education training in order to judge you. Student surveys have little insight due to a large portion of students that use it as a response to their grade.
I heavily depend upon "slides" to keep me on track, they work quite well if properly used like speech notecards. Some students print them out and write notes in the white space because there is a table of contents and page numbers which helps them organize their notes better.
When you teach the same stuff you already know all the time it is really DULL! The subject matter is always boring, which is why I think so many instructors lose interest - they are into the subject not education itself. Some are there for research, some for the job, some because they are overqualified for what they like doing, and a few of us are there because we like educating (like myself.)
Oh, there are many variations of thought along the lines: "people are getting dumber." I've heard a wide range from deevolution half-jokes to consumerism to misconceptions about what college is. Me, I think some of it comes from their age- the older you get the more out of touch you get with your own student experience. My memories of college are fading, at least I still remember I was a bad student.
Prosper is awesome.
I do presentations based on academic papers, and it is great to just be able to copy equations and figures straight out of the source code of the paper, directly into the source code of the presentation. No doubt Powerpoint weenies do the same thing from their Word documents, but Word is absolutely awful at equations (and many other things).
Beamer is another good Latex presentation tool. I haven't started using it yet, but I'm planning to do so in the future. It looks even better than Prosper.
PPT is designed with this in mind silly. If everyone remembered all the stuff the sales guys presented, the companies would have a much harder time honoring their promises.
With PPT they forget everything and the sales guys get to wow people with pretty graphics in their "powerpoints". It's the best sales tool there is. Educationally it's a wash. Sales and education are incompatible goals.
-AC
I make web pages, with a "slideshow" stylesheet that works well with OperaShow. I like to have the thing online when I do my presentation. The last page displays the URL it is at. Anyone can come back to it any time they want to. This way I don't have to bother with distributing hard copies or emailing soft copies.
Constitutionally Correct
Insert a blank slide (preferably black, so it looks as if the projector were turned off) where you intent to talk. No bullets, graphics or special effects. The audience will focus on the speaker, and actually listen to what is said.
When you have a message to impart, this method works.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I've never slept better than during a PowerPoint presentation. Especially the ones by computer science teachers.
Actually, I appreciate it when they put them online. I pretty much skipped an entire semester of AI classes and then read the slides online the night before the exam and got a B+. What a bunch of idiots.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Yes, a presentation with PowerPoint may be worse than a presentation without PowerPoint, but it's usually better than no presentation at all. And PowerPoint does make preparation of presentations easy enough that a lot of stuff people wouldn't have talked about/shown in the past now gets at least talked about.
Force the presenter to present with a 386 box running windows 3.1 with no soundcard, connecting it to a black and white projector.
Here's a blog (not mine) that is extremely helpful on how to do clean and nice presentations...
[ ]
oops. hold on. let me go back, I think that's really on the first slide in the second group...
Point being: any presentation is only as good as the presenter and their own organization.
Our brain isn't organized like a fixed slide tray, we shouldn't have to think like one.
I saw Doug Englebart give one that had thumbnails around the edge when he needed them (gestural I think - at any rate they were innocuous until referenced) - so he could go linear, or go to anything he needed when he needed it and engage the audience and adapt to their understanding.
Most PP templates are complicated style over any substance. I've moved exclusively to Keynote - understated, fewer assumptions, better graphics. Distracting the content with flaming borders and lousily-scaling stuff is bad.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I worked a a university and every presentation I've ever seen made me cringe. They pretty well went this way:
...
... um... Today I'm going to present a methodology for making french fries. Um... I'll address the varieties of potato(e)s... um... that you can get. Um... Then I'll talk about knives and their uses, um... cutting boards, knife handling, potato handling, peeling efficiently, oh darn, this isn't the last version of this presentation, it's supposed to have a header for peelers, anyway, um... um... and I'll finish with cutting motions."
First silde:
--- A Methodology for making french fries ---
o Variety of potato(e)s
o Knives and their uses
o Cutting boards
o Knife handling
o Potato handling
o Peeling efficiently
o Cutting motions
And while this slide is up, the speaker goes on like this:
"Hello!
"Any questions?"
And then the next slide comes on and I feign a terrible bout of diarrhea so I can leave the room.
Thanks, I can read fine by myself. (><)
Don't get too jealous, they're generally leftovers from board meetings; they leave them in the conference rooms so that us peons don't set our coffee cups directly down on the tables and leave rings.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Its more like a sales presentation than all too many lecturers want to think; the fundamental techniques of getting people to retain the ideas you are presenting aren't that much different."
Selling isn't really about "retaining ideas". In fact, ideas aren't even required to sell something.
"Powerpoint bad for learning"....Not true! It is bad in the specific circumstance mentioned in the article...that of repeating the exact words seen on the screen.
That said, I work in a high school and even though most students don't seem to absorb it, Powerpoint is taught as a tool to reinforce the points of your presentation (diagrams, images, graphics, etc) not to show your speech on the screen. It has been known for a long time that visual aids to a speech should not be including large written portions of your presentation.
The article does a fair job of making this point. The Slashdot editors are heavily biasing this in the article title by blatantly calling powerpoint bad for learning...
my 2 cents
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
I got nothing out lectures when I took notes. I was too busy taking notes to pay attention to the material. If I reviewed the notes later, maybe they would make sense. Often, they made no sense. I found that I probably only just re-created the lecture outline being used by the lecturer.
You experience of getting absolutely nothing out of lectures by sitting there and listening to the speaker is the opposite of my experience. Of course, it depends on the lecturer, but I could forgo all book reading and taking notes for many classes if I just listened, and listened to the point of understanding, to the lecture. If I understood the lecture, I learned the material.
Your mileage my vary.
Let me give you an example of a discussion that some fellow students and I might have:
Student 1: "How's that class with [such and such a prof]?"
Student 2: "Don't take it with him, it's death by Powerpoint."
And profs wonder why few people show up after the third week of class.
Other than that, PowerPoint has steadily increased in use. This matches the availability of PCs for more personnel, networks that can make 'send me your slides' easy and especially the proliferation of PROJECTORS and LSD [large scale displays in this case; ironic acronym, though.]
PowerPoint did not start this process: Before PowerPoint there was Harvard Graphics with a LCD panel device on an overhead projector. Before that there were dot matrix printouts copied to thermal transfer overheads. Before that, laboriously hand drawn overhead slides...
Public speaking is a difficult craft. Powerpoint was probably thought of as an aid but it appears it is probably just a distraction. The computer age has degraded many things due to its novelty value. Public speaking and handwriting are two that I have observed.Used to be a time when the spaeaker had to do something really interesting like tap dancing when he forgot his words. So I guess this is why the popularity tap dancing has declined also.
at the University of NSFW.
Bravo. I was really waiting for someone to bring that up. Everyone learns differently, and some people live their whole lives not knowing how they learned what they learned over the years.
If I was on /. long enough to give mod points, I'd have wild monkey mod with you.
Hell Yes! I remember every field trip I was ever on in high school because it was so out of the norm. Same thing goes for my physics class: we did LOTS of hands-on experimentation that continues to stick with me.
Actually, what I think is ideal is a powerpoint that you can write on while you're talking.
I got a tablet PC a year or so ago. (I'm writing this post on it, as a matter of fact.) And the very few times I've had the opportunity to present on it, being able to actually write on it has been invaluable. I can check off the points I'm covering to emphasize them. I can draw a chart that occurs to me in the middle of my presentation. I can correct errors on the spot. If I were sufficiently comfortable speaking with it (in all honesty, I haven't used it for presentations enough to be that comfortable yet), I'd leave blank slides for me to write on as I speak.
At the same time, the PowerPoint lets me have a certain degree of information already in place. I can use graphs, I can have all the pre-written stuff that PowerPoint currently lets me have, without sacrificing flexibility.
I don't really think tablet PCs are that useful yet for anyone who doesn't present a lot, who doesn't take a lot of notes that wee for purely personal use (college students, i.e. me), or who doesn't write nearly as well when typing as opposed to writing (also me). But for anyone who fits those categories, tablet pcs are great.
Even if it does keep thinking I wrote 'wee' whenever I write 'are'.
teachers are better off giving students solved problems so they have the learning to take home,"
Instead of just a parameter synopsis, what percentage of linux man pages include a thorough working example at the end? Might cut down the need to call people dumb newbies.
OK, maybe the article gets it wrong. I certainly hope the article gets it wrong. It's basically saying that rote learning is best. Sorry. Not True. If you want people to learn stuff, you want them to get down in the dirt and experience the 'stuff' for themselves, directly. And, yeah, learning is hard work for most of us. So what.
Not even going to address the idea that different people have different learning styles. Nope, not going to suggest that some people can absorb information passively, while others need to have a conversation, while others need to pick it up in their hands. No, just go along with the zeitgeist... Rote learning, bible studies, whatever.
... from TFA: don't read the points out if they in text on screen because the human brain's short term memory is compromised by doubling up on the same information in the same format.
Bitter and proud of it.
I'm finishing my undergraduate degree in Mathematics at Tel-Aviv University now, and from my experience what I can say is that any kind of slides are impossible to follow properly. A talk goes much better without any presentation at all, and when the presenter writes on the blackboard the points he wants you to follow. Single slides are good for drawings and illustrations, but not more. Usually, when someone uses a presentation, is because he decides that there's not enough time to write during the lecture what he wants, and thinks it's faster to write it ahead, but then there's usually not enough time to read and understand what he's showing.
*reads again* - oh.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
9/10ths of the "teaching" done in my course this year was powerpoint. The problem with Powerpoint is this: it takes two and a half hours of slides (per class) to explain something I could have read in 5 minutes.
I did the math with wasted time and travel time to/from classes, and decided I was wasting my life staring at Arial-typeface text on a projector screen. So I stopped going altogether, other than to go in last week and tell them I want to drop out.
If PowerPoint is bad, then what is a good way to present to an audience? What about using beamer (slides using LaTeX -> Pdf)? Are slides bad? This is one in a long series of useless studies. One can give a good presentation with well-created slides and good speaking skills.
I've delivered that presentation, um, you insensitive scrod!
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
In advertising we already know this for decades.