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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."
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.
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.
I think we all have, and it is true hell, and creates immediate distrust in the presenter.
See also: information presentation expert Edward Tufte's essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.
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That's why Tufte and his information-architecture crew always recommend putting important information *on a handout* -- by which they mean a real hand-out with copies of the data, not a "teaser" summary or (worse) tiny screenshots of the slides.
Power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.
--Edward Tufte
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7) Send out the presentation ahead of time.
Some meetings seem like college classes where everyone is copying down pages of notes about what is being displayed instead of listening to what is being said or actually trying to comprehend the subject matter.
Also, know your audience should be on that list. I've seen way too many presentations where someone is going into painful implementation details with management people who don't understand the implementation, don't understand the details, and only want to distill a 10 second sound bite out of the whole presentation.
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.
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.
Yep. Waiting for twenty minutes while the presenter screws around trying to get the laptop to reboot (nervously joking about it the whole time) and THEN sitting through that jerk reading his slides verbatim.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
According to the article, no. Trying to use Powerpoint as a reinforcement is actually counterproductive. When the brain has to process verbal and written variants of the same data, comprehension is reduced. Slides should be used only for things like pictures and diagrams.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
Great idea. And then they would have said, "No problem! Drop the course and take it later we will refund the cost of the class."
And then what would happen? You would be short of a full load, waiting to take the class the next quarter/semester. Praying the whole time that the asshole isn't the ONLY guy who teaches that level 200 course.
Not to mention also praying that the course is offered at all in the next quarter or semester!
If either one of those things turns out to be true (which is almost certain), Then YOU are the ass, as you will end up delaying your graduation date because of one prick and one class that you couldn't handle.
In a perfect world we go to college to get educated and you would spend the 10 years there battling it out with the adminstration to get the education you deserve for your money.
In reality, most people just want to graduate so they can get on with their lives.
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.