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."

Comments

Re:Who's at fault though?

[UbuntuDupe]

Well, it's tricky, and I've never found an easy way to do it. Put all the information, and there's clutter. Put too little, and there's nothing to keep the eye occupied while you ramble.

Re:Who's at fault though?

[LibertineR]

Is there anything worse than sitting through some jerk reading their slides verbatim, instead of using them as points to be expanded upon?

I think we all have, and it is true hell, and creates immediate distrust in the presenter.

Much of PowerPoint banned in military 10 years ago

[Jameson Burt]

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.

Re:Who's at fault though?

[Azathfeld]

Another good example is the visual presentation of information in An Inconvenient Truth. Gore uses data and images as a reinforcement of what he's saying, and never as a way to simply repeat what's in the lecture.

Only one guide is necessary.

[Lethyos]

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.

Re:Who's at fault though?

[lmpeters]

During a class on child development I took last semester, everyone had to do a presentation in front of the rest of the class on a particular topic. Most people crammed all the information on the slides and read them verbatim, much like you describe. My group, on the other hand, just put a few bullet points on each slide, and interspersed them with visuals that helped convey the points I was making. I also threw in a few exercises where the class could participate, such as a sequence of pictures where the class tried to remember as many of them as possible and tell me what they saw after the last picture went away.

I feel pretty confident that, while the information in other presentations was at about the same level of difficulty as ours, the class learned more from our presentation than any other. All because I actually knew how to make a good PowerPoint slideshow.

Therefore, my feeling is that PowerPoint and similar programs aren't necessarily bad for learning, but they're often horribly misused. Since it offers such a user-friendly look and feel, many PowerPoint users underestimate how much care needs to go into a good slideshow.

Educational professionals say "This is crap"

[MythoBeast]

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.

Re:How to Best Use PowerPoint

[644bd346996]

A dissenting opinion that seems to miss the point in several ways.

For example:

The slides are written for the benefit of the speaker. The above statement is absurd. Slides are for the audience to look at. Nothing should be on the slide that won't be helpful to the audience. The speaker's notes should either be in his hand or on the podium. Norman almost seems to understand this. He ends that paragraph with this:

The question is, if the slides are for the speaker, why does the audience have to be subjected to them? Unfortunately, he doesn't ever get around to answering the question.

One of Tufte's most important points is that most people tend to dumb down the data to fit the presentation, rather than adapt the presentation so that it can effectively convey all the information. Norman's response amounts to saying "No, you don't understand!" Instead, Norman should back up his assertion that presentations should go light on meaningful data.

Listeners cannot absorb too much information at once. Talks should be limited to getting across just a few critical points. The goal is to get the listener interested enough to explore the subject in more depth on their own, perhaps by reading, perhaps by conversation. If too much is packed into a talk, the listener becomes overloaded and is apt to remember less than if the talk were better paced with less information. Worse, the listener may simply give up and cease following. Perhaps even worse is that listeners might get interested and pause to pursue some implications mentally, only later to discover that they thereby missed other material.

This is one of the points Tufte has continually failed to grasp, not only in his diatribe against PowerPoint, but in almost all of his publications and talks. Tufte is a statistician and I suspect that for him, nothing could be more delightful than a graph or chart which can capture the interest for hours, where each new perusal yields even more information. I agree that this is a marvelous outcome, but primarily for readers, for people sitting in comfortable chairs, with good light and perhaps a writing pad. For people with a lot of time to spend, to think, to ponder. This is not what happens within a talk. Present a rich and complex slide and the viewer is lost. By the time they have figured out the slide, the speaker is off on some other topic.

The above paragraphs assume that a presenter who has developed his slides according to Tufte's ideals will still present them the way they would present lists of bullet points. If somebody takes the time to develop an effective chart, odds are that they will take the time to explain it and point out the more important trends that it reveals. It is not counterproductive if an audience member also notices a trend that you do not have time to talk about. To assume that it would be counterproductive, as Norman consistently does, it to assume that your audience is stupid, or at least slow on the uptake. With that condescending attitude, your presentation is guaranteed to be bad.

Re:How to Best Use PowerPoint

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen Tufte lecture. He presented for the better part of 6 hours, and didn't use ANY slides.

He made the presentation engaging, took on the audience's skepticism, showed real-world examples and objects, DID provide a handout, and captivated us all day long.

I took away a brain-full of new ideas and information.

Two problems for the real-world, though:

1. Not everybody is Tufte. He's a great presenter. A lot of my college professors were well-meaning schlubs, and I was able to doze through my 7:30 AM classes. Still, I'd lose interest in a schlub with or without a PowerPoint show.

2. People in F500 companies are forced to present, whether they have anything to say or not. It's a political thing. You have a national sales meeting, everything's going great, you don't have any needed adjustments to make, doesn't matter: you STILL have to get up on stage and talk for an hour.

One of Tufte's main thrusts is that you make compelling presentations of information by having compelling information to present.

If you're up there onstage running your mouth just to reinforce your position as the alpha-(fe)male, that's not exactly compelling, and will bore, will disengage. With PowerPoint or without.