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Attack of the PowerPoint-Wielding Professors
theodp writes "A CS student blogger named Carolyn offers an interesting take on why learning from PowerPoint lectures is frustrating. Unlike an old-school chalk talk, professors who use PowerPoint tend to present topics very quickly, leaving little time to digest the visuals or to take learning-reinforcing notes. Also, profs who use the ready-made PowerPoint lectures that ship with many textbooks tend to come across as, shall we say, less than connected with their material. Then there are professors who just don't know how to use PowerPoint, a problem that is by no means limited to college classes."
Are all college professors doing this? I think there are always in every generation going to be professors who don't want to put much effort into teaching classes. They are either there for doing research and thus don't care about learning or they aren't sure what they are doing there and just needed a job. There are a few annoying classes I took (in computer science even) where the professor would simply read from the book.
What I find really scary is the stories I've seen of grade-school kids being required to submit their report as a powerpoint presentation....
(sorry, no link, but I'm not kidding)
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Wow, I'm old. I never really stopped and thought about just how horrid modern class rooms have become, I certainly never pictured some twit droning on from a canned Power Point.
On the upside you'll be properly prepared for any number of meetings.
I prefer when professors use their powerpoint presentations because I can just download them from the web and spare going to the boring lectures.
There's a RIGHT way to use a computerized slides, and a WRONG way. MOST people do it the wrong way - trying to cram as much text as possible onto a single slide, then reading the slides to the audience. I won't even mention those that think their presentation isn't complete without AT LEAST 100 slides filled with, after everyone's brain has switched off, gibberish.
Slides are meant to ENHANCE and SUPPORT a presentation, not BE the presentation. They will NOT turn a mediocre teacher into a great one. I have a doctorate, so I've probably been in more years of classes than the author of the article (3rd year of college). I have been in some excellent world class courses that relied heavily on power point presentations (my microbiology teacher was just a GOOD teacher). And I have attended mind blisteringly dull lectures done on chalk (or whiteboard) in such varied topics as biochemistry and physiology (that cardiologist who will remain nameless - she simply doesn't know how to teach!). It's not the medium, it's the teacher.
Being a leader in your field or winning awards and prizes does NOT necessarily qualify you to teach well - that is an art in itself. And any number of audio-visual aids will not hide the fact that you're just a boring person that has no idea how to get your message across.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Back in the days (appr. the seventies) we (the students) thought that it would be about time to abolish lectures, given that there were other means to get aquainted with the material (then mainly books). But today?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Speaking as a former professor who has written two entire semesters of Powerpoint lectures in Java, I think the medium is especially effective if the professor knows the material. I gave away my lectures and posted them online forever, so my students loved them. I also do not use powerpoint as just static slides. I use the animation feature to simulate the execution of code, showing (not telling) how variables are handled, how pass by value versus pass by reference works--things like that. It is really valuable if the professor is not a lazy sack of shit. That's the real problem--lazy professors. Profs who write their own lectures are anything but lazy.
I went to undergrad from 2002-2006. I had profs who used PowerPoint daily and I learned a ton from them. I had profs who used a "good old chalk talk" and they were awful. When it comes down to it, it's the prof. If he's a gifted teacher, it will shine through no matter which medium he chooses. Do yourself a favor and look up reviews for your profs before you sign up for their class.
Until recently, I was a vocal opponent of PowerPoint. I had read Tufte's essay and applied the assertion-evidence structure to my slides. When presenting certain types of data to an english audience, these measures are effective.
But when a relevant percentage of the audience does not understand English, or when the presenter does not speak English, writing the entire presentation down on the slides and reading off the slides is a more effective way of communicating. ESL students are more able to comprehend what they read than what they hear. What 'using powerpoint well' means is a function of the audience and the material.
Conclusion? Chalk Talk rules for fundamental science teaching. Powerpoint is probably OK for management theory classes.
Today we're talking about what's wrong with Powerpoint.
o And Why It Should Be Banned
And why its use should be banned.
o Speakers just put up bullet list and then read from it.
The biggest problem is that speakers put up a Powerpoint bullet list and then just read from it.
o Like their audience is illiterate or sumpin.
Like they think their audience is a bunch of illiterates or sumpin.
o Powerpoint presenters also say things like "actionizing our solutioning".
Also, Powerpoint seems to encourage speakers to say things like "actionizing our solutioning".
SLIDE 1
Let's move to slide 2.
And again, education is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a series of lectures given by knowledgeable professors. It's, it's a series of...Powerpoint presentations!
I'm a third grade teacher, and my boss recently told me that my students need to be taught powerpoint so they can learn to make presentations. Mind you, my third graders are only now learning to touch type.
But then, my boss presents everything in PP, tends to read the slides aloud, and relies on cool whiz-bang effects a and graphics to tart up his presentations.
I guess if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
There are various reasons why power point should be banned from schools. There's nothing wrong with power point, per se, but professors who use it, tend to abuse it and use it in ways that are counter to a learning environment.
I took a biology class a few years back where the professor provided a powerpoint presentation for every class. We were supposed to print it out before class and then in class, he would read through the power point presentation. Literally, word for word, reading the presentation, with little or no additional information. Obviously, once I figured out this was his modus operandi, I stopped going to the clas, as I'm quite capable of reading a power point presentation myself.
The problem with power point is that it's presenter (teacher) centric. This is fine in some forums, but in a classroom, a class lesson should be student centric. Students should interact and ask questions. The lesson should go at the pace that the students can absorb it, not at the pace the teacher can present it.
If all that's required to learn the information is to read, then why even have a class? Just give the kids a book and send them on their way...
The rise of PowerPoint for teaching is something I've been annoyed with for years. Honestly the best teaching tool my Professors ever used was the overhead transparency projector -- the type where the transparency was on a spool that the professor cranked to get a clean surface. This was far more legible then chalk, plus you could go crank the transparency spool in the opposite direction after class if you missed something. Not chalk dust either.
Powerpoint is annoying as professors tend to only put meaningless bullet points and skip working out the equations in real time, explaining as they go along. A good professor is interactive with the class, not just someone who reads from a script pointed at the screen. Sadly, this is way most (but not all) PowerPoint professors operate.
I just graduated recently with a degree in CS and I had an instructor who would do half and half. The class was data structures. He did this in a very good way. He would go over the theories and concepts of a data structure for the first half, and then he would actually keep his computer projected onto the screen while he was actually programming the data structure we just discussed. Of course, class participation was a must. When I say he was programming it, he was really just typing what we told him until the entire class got stuck. When we got stuck on a piece that we clearly did not know, he would go into great detail about that piece. Honestly, I learned more from that data structures class than any other class I took at college. Really, using PowerPoint is not bad if you do it correctly.
The world is how you make it
powerpoint is an 'aid' to a presentation and should not be the presentation itself. say, if Jesus used PPs to present his teachings would he be as effective? anything extra speakers does directly competes with what the speaker has to say for listener's attention.
.....is certainly not demonstrated in this video. However, I do see more and more of this style these days
How NOT to use Powerpoint
The other day I was watching Jon Stewart and he was explaining something vague about Hitler stealing Geln Beck from us internal organ by internal organ by internal organ. None of it made any sense till he rolled in the chalk board and explained the link between Acorn, small and large intestines (something Karl Marx had) and the stomach, then it all became very very clear. If in doubt, use a chalk board. That is my dictum now.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Be careful what you wish for.
I had a professor that DID know what he was talking about, he decided that he wanted us to learn so much in a single course that this was a common occurance.
Professor arrives in class. 3 seconds later he has an overhead projector up and is now talking and writing directly on blank transparancy paper. The rate at which he was writing was near stream-of-consciousness. I typically took 20-30 PAGES of notes in a single lecture, and these notes were basically a transcription of his non-stop lecture. You couldn't afford to miss a single thing he said. He basically wrote one one sheet, slid it to the other side of the projector, and then started another one on the right side. If you were a fast writer, you could just finish up the previous page just as he completed the next.
The problem was that he did know what he was talking about, but it was the ultra-condenced version. You had to go home and take a few hours to review the classes transcript. Thankfully, he scanned his sheets and sent them out the next week. I doubt I could have survived that class on my notes alone.
Although it was nice in that since he wrote almost everything down, any accent barriers were inconsequential.
(The course wasn't a walk in the park either, it was our digital signals processing course)
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Well, I teach an undergraduate course and avoid using presentation software -which, anyway, would have been Lyx plus Beamer for me-, for largely the kind of reasons advanced in TFA. Most of my colleagues use PowerPoint or something similar this days.
And I'm starting to notice that many students actually prefer the PP-teachers. They want to have the information delivered in formulaic pills, "Concept A stands for blah; Concept B stands for bleh", and this is more easily achieved if the formulae in question are neatly projected on the screen. I could achieve the same effect by dictating, of course, but that's even more boring and less empowering for students that PowerPoint.
And your problem is that you learn nothing in life and are solely driven by hormones triggered by the opinion of others, or what you believe to be the opinion of others. You are truly pathetic. Try living for your own self instead of trying to "be fun to be around" you insecure zealot. In time you'll notice that your exchanged dialogues are much more satisfying than "oh my god I just love The Jonas Brothers", or "yeah how about that weather."
You should seriously rethink your life, I'm not joking. Oh and if you think intelligent people seem elitist it's because of your arrogance. You think you're open minded, but believing in bullshit is not being open minded. Being open minded means you're always prone to change your mind, which you obviously aren't. Idiot.
.. Chicken chicken chicken.
One of the problems we have is that making a powerpoint presentation is a lot like making a web page when it comes to newbies. "Oooh, I can make a black background, blinking red text, and add a bunch of cupids shooting hearts!!!" We have profs here that use different backgrounds and transitions for every slide, add sounds, etc. They think it looks very sophisticated, when in fact, it creates a barrier to learning. When we review their slides for online use, we try to come up with some guidelines, like "Use one theme, with only a few colors" or "No more than 2 different fonts, pref. Sans Serif. Nothing below 18 pt. in size." We have to do this because they use Camtasia Studio to turn their presentations into Flash movies, and a mix of colors, fonts, etc. makes the file size blow up.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Airline food, isn't it terrible? And the lines! Also some people are bad at driving. I mean...gratz on a well constructed criticism of powerpoint in the classroom, but you aren't really breaking new ground.
OBJECTIVES:
- Ridicule PPT presentations (good!)
- Education Rant
- Pitfalls
o Boring
o Lack of connection
o Obligatory MS rant
- Conclusions
Note: there will be a test Thr, make sure you are familiar with this material
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Powerpoint is the worst thing to ever happen to higher education. It lets these professors, whose teaching abilities are minimal to begin with, just coast through their responsibilities to the students. They think they don't have to do any real teaching anymore.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Bad teaching is not new - but since the powerpoint thingy is new, they teach badly in a new way.
"Any questions?"
(silence)
"So, you must have understood everything!" (-- wrong conclusion
Epic if it had been created in Power Point...
Just sayin'
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Give each section a title. Then write just two or three points for each section.
Do not make the mistake of writing a fully correct grammatical sentence for each point. Make it short and pithy. Just a sentence fragment or phrase preceded by a small filled circle will do.
Arrange these sections in a landscape format. Use a large 28 point font for the section titles and something like a 24 point font for the two or three points you make in each section.
Choose a nice color and a not-too-distracting-but-not-very-bland either border decoration and apply it to all the sections.
Add a nice title section.
Presto, your blog post is very eminently presentable to millions of college students in a easy to present format that appears to be nice and slick. As an added bonus before someone comprehends enough of it to ask you any tough questions, you would scrammed out of there with plenty of time to spare.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The interesting thing for me is I am old enough to remember when students complain that some professors actually still writes on the board instead of using powerpoint! Because (1) their handwriting is poor, (2) professors write too fast anyway, trying to copy and listen at the same time is too much for many students, (3) professors could send out the powerpoint if they used it, so students don't have to copy them down!
Now, cue a decade later, professors used powerpoints and student complained they do not write on the board.
Yeah, right.
Newsflash! Learning is hard work. Unlike watching movies where you just sit in stupor for 2 hours and be entertained, when you attend a lecture you work hard to absorb and understand the materials presented by the professor. Most professor don't have $100M movie budget and 2 years to prepare a 2 hour lecture to entertain you.
If the presentation is lacking, then you take the effort to understand the content from it. If you cannot find any content in the lecture, then the course is probably not for you, either too easy or too hard, go enroll in another course, or read the textbooks yourself if you think the lectures are too easy.
You are responsible for your own learning. And if you are good, you might have understood this already before you leave school.
Oliver.
I have never had a professor who used slides which were shipped with some sort of textbook. I also never had ONE book as literature reference to any course I took at university. In school, teachers tend to use parts of schoolbooks and other material provided by schoolbook publishers, but at university it would be strange to use "schoolbooks" for lectures. That sounds fishy to me.
And BTW slides can also produced with other software packages beside PowerPoint. For example latex-beamer which was used by several professors at my last university. And of course the slides are available online for the students before the lecture, so they can take notes on the printout version of the slides or on their notebooks, depending on what they prefer.
Years of college to get a degree in CS while being subjected to mind numbing power point slides destroyed my soul. All I wanted to do was work with real hardware, networks, OS', etc.
The textbook says [insert OS here] works and everything integrates properly but until I got into the field I was just a talented geek who had a hobby of trying to keep his box running on low cost korean parts while savagely violation his ISP's ToS in the name of learning.
Maybe I just don't appreciate the "traditional" classroom environment but I believe education starts by doing. Cramming a chapter of a textbook into a slideshow does nothing.
I say that's a lie.
I see not much has changed:
- we used to have a prof who had chalk in the right hand, and an eraser in the left. He'd start writing and erasing almost simultaneously, so you had to be really quick to write down notes. At least a powerpoint can be downloaded and viewed later.
- Am I the only one that had the slide projectors in grade school? That had a record or cassette along with it that would ding when you went to the next slide? Or am I just showing my age?
Just my personal opinion, but I think a reliance on technology for technologies sake can be an impediment to great education. Human interaction is an important part of communication and teaching.
Not only powerpoint, but some classes at my alma matter began having so-called laptop classes. I had one for calculus II. It was basically an excuse for kids to goof off. People were instant messaging each other or going on the internet. Laptop classes are a waste in most cases in my opinion, unless it is graduate work and complex programs are needed. It is like teaching from a powerpoint. If a lecturer just repeats exactly what is on the powerpoint it is extremely boring.
Give me a professor who wants to interact with students and really teach, and I will take that every time over any great online lecture, powerpoint slides, etc.
In both classes very little time is given towards class discussion or Q&A.
Powerpoints are a win-win for colleges though -- less skilled teachers can be employed at lower wages.
My university professors use PowerPoint, but they always either hand out the slides or have them available for download on the university website.
Imagination and Memory are but one thing which, for diverse considerations, have diverse names.
I studied maths at uni, undergrad and postgrad. At undergrad level, I learnt everything from reading books, taking notes from books, doing exercises in books, teaching newer students, doing more exercises in books, asking lots of questions to and having highly interactive discussions with seniors and peers, and setting my own challenges or filling in gaps in books. I attended as few lectures as possible, and got very little out of them.
I've always thought lectures were a legacy from the days when books were too expensive.
N.B. I've also got very little out of web sites, unless we're just talking about an Internet-accessible archive of historical works or journals. Wikipedia, for example, is occasionally good for opening paragraphs when I'm completely clueless, but every article quickly and descends into the result of 1,000 "editors" with no uniform style, purpose, level of detail, etc. Inevitably there's one long section on some obscure topic reflecting either the author's special interest (sometimes - these are well-written when politically neutral) or what he's recently learnt in an undergrad class (inevitably either recognisable cut-paste jobs or horribly naive expositions).
I've given impromptu math lessons to my kids while hiking. Writing implement: stick. Medium: the ground. Very effective. Learning is not about technology. It is first about interest. A distant second is the teacher. When the student is ready to learn something, the teacher will become available.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Powerpoint is the worst fucking program ever written. It has no point except to fill up time with mindless drivel, to divert your attention so you don't notice the presenter perpetually has a booger hanging from his nose, and to make you think you're getting actual information, when in fact you are getting a series of tweets.
Powerpoint blows.
Computers blow.
That's why I refuse to ever use a computer.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"Unlike an old-school chalk talk, professors who use PowerPoint tend to present topics very quickly, leaving little time to digest the visuals or to take learning-reinforcing notes"
Sounds like how my professors used to lecture with printed slides and, to a lesser extent, when writing slides by hand during the lecture. To cover the material, the lectures couldn't really have gone much slower but this can be addressed by providing students with decent printed notes, which all too often were missing or of extremely poor quality. The degree was very educational but to a large extent this was due to the hard work of students in their study time and due to the small group teaching that followed the lectures and attempted to pick up the pieces.
Not fantastic value-for-money given how expensive these courses are - but to some extent, that's what's going to happen if you choose *teaching* roles based on how good at research a professor is. Or for that matter, based on how senior and entrenched in the department and university a professor is. If you're going to pay someone to do something, you ought to have some decent oversight and minimum standards they are required to meet. Universities are not good at this sort of thing in my experience.
And somebody from a country like Sweden would laugh uproariously at the thought of Obama being described as a "socialist."
I am a college professor myself, and absolutely hate using PowerPoint presentations to try to convey a point to my students. Often times, because you have to turn the lights low in order to see the presentation, students will take that time to catch up on a few useless minutes of sleep, and often will not even pay attention to what I, nor the presentation are attempting to relay to them. Unfortunately, I encountered the constant belief that PP presentations were a good way to provide knowledge to students while I was earning my degree. When questioned beyond the scope of the presentation, any of the "professors" could not answer, what seemed to me, simple questions. It was this experience which has led me to use no PP presentations during instruction now. I may occasionally put up a single slide to easily convey a table of data, but will not teach an entire lesson from one of these abominations. Much to my chagrin, I am one of the few professors at the college that feel that way; a fair estimate suggests that 90% of professors throughout the U.S. still use PowerPoint presentations to teach their classes.
...it's clear that the person blogging this has only really experienced things on one side of the fence. I used to Head TA some large intro CS classes for an Ivy school, and currently work in Instructional Technology. I think her complaints are valid, but don't really have a lot to do with PowerPoint - it's just a fact of life that some professors are bad lecturers. Using PowerPoint as a lecture tool can go pretty badly - but guess what, so can using a chalkboard! I've read a lot of student evaluations in my time, and for every student complaining that the class used too many slides, there's one who's upset we didn't have enough. Some students don't want to take notes, others do. This is part of the challenge of teaching - to find an even ground where every student is satisfied with the lecture style. For example, she says "what helps me most is doing problems step by step as a class". However, I've seen some students who *hate* this approach - so what about them? Do we just forget about them? Ignore them? I personally don't take notes very well, so I like having handouts to supplement lectures. Does this make me a bad student? Honestly, the blog post isn't all that different from some of the student evaluations I read for classes - one student's opinion about what his or her perfect class is. Unfortunately, other students might feel differently. A good professor can be engaging *regardless* of how they present. If you only lecture well with PowerPoint and the projector in your lecture hall breaks, what do you do? The student here is missing the much bigger picture, which is that bad teaching is just bad teaching - whether it be slides, chalk, or overheads.
Powerpoint presentations are just horrible - especially if they contain equations. LaTeX, chalk or I'm not attending the talk.
When it comes to Power Point, Steve Lowe said it best: Power Point, the Microsoft tool that encourages people to think and talk like fuckheads. You can check out more in his book "Is it just me or is everything shit?"
Civilization, the death of dreams.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am a professor at a large research university. I very occasionally (maybe twice a semester) use Keynote presentations, though usually if I have to present material visually, I use just a whiteboard and some markers.
What's strange is that I often get students who ASK for "Powerpoints". They seem to think that this way they can be sure that their notes are "complete".
The only benefit I ever found from this was the fact that all the professors who used powerpoint or something similar made all their class slides available for download either before or directly after the lecture. I stopped taking notes and just followed along ...
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
The problem is not power point but bad professors. Teaching is HARD WORK.
You're paying for this education, and paying more than ever really, so when your professor's
idea of teaching is to simply play through a bunch of crappy pre-made slides,
raise a hell about it !
Absolute statements are never true
Presentation software is just a tool. I had a professor who could actually handle it pretty well. He had his slides set up in a very simple but readable manner, they weren't cramped. They were to the point, short and very well planned. And he gave each of his students a miniature printout of the lectures slides, so that everybody could anotate each one by himself with whatever they needed.
He'd use maybe 40 slides in a 90 minute lecture. His talk was educating, informative, sometimes quite humorous and you could actually understand what he was saying simply because he didn't have to hop around 3 chalkboards all the time but could stay put at the podium. He was allways well prepared and his lectures where a feast. And that even though it was a hard subject (IT-electronics subcurriculum in CS).
Bottom line: ... duh). Use them correctly and you will be able to utilise the benefits that they bring along. It's that simple.
Presentation software, just like chalkboards, are nothing but tools. Use them badly or in the wrong way and your results will be accordingly (like, f.i., cramped, braindead presentation-slides or crappy handwriting on chalkboards
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
PowerPoint presentations for class lectures makes outlining lectures virtually impossible. I tried one semester and found that I was having to leave blank spots all over the place and return to topics and subtopics from sometimes pages ahead.
At least overhead transparencies were in some kind of outline format. I miss the days when thoughts were organized.
Not to say there are not good PowerPoint presentations out there. I have had one professor use PowerPoint in an amazingly effective manner, but essentially by breaking all the PowerPoint rules. Bah.
I guess I have been fortunate. I am currently almost done with my MSEE, and I have been at the same school since the beginning (UNH). All the classes that I took in the ECE department, even the ones I hated, have been chalk+blackboard (marker+whiteboard), with .ppts only used as supplements. I get the feeling from every professor I have had that they want the students to actually learn something. I attribute this to the philosophy of the department and to the selection of professors the dean has made. I remember last year they had a slot for a new professor; they made each candidate give a lecture in front of all the other professors, the deans, and any students who wanted to come. Talk about a job interview! So all-in-all and obviously: it depends on the school/department/professor.
I've taken college courses from the 1975-1982 pre-slide era and from 2000-2009 with slides. Believe me, having slides is ALWAYS better than not. A fast prof is far less of a problem than an illegible or incoherent one.
As to profs with slides who move too fast... The solution is simple. Print the slides before class and then write your notes on them. Any reputable prof makes their slides available (which is a damned sight better than your having to transcribe their illegible chalkboard scribblings, ESP. in math classes). Just ask that they be posted before class so you can print 'em.
FYI for the younger crowd... Back before the 'net, the better departments/profs actually would designate a student to transcribe and rewrite each class's lecture notes for redistribution to the rest of the class, just so note takers didn't have to struggle to keep pace with a fast lecturer. Today's presentation slides do this for us.
Final advice... Get used to it. You're going to see slides in every single presentation you attend as a pro. Bad presenters are inevitable, but don't blame the medium for a message that sucks.
There were shitty overhead transparency packs from textbook publishers long before Powerpoint. And the worst professor I ever encountered was a Trig guy from Jamaica whose accent was so thick and handwriting so bad he invented a dozen new letters for the Greek alphabet. No, this is like blaming shitty writing on the computer, acting as if shitty writers never worked on typewriters. And before that I'm sure longhand enthusiasts were cursing the scourge of the typewriter for promoting lazy thinking and balderdash. Al Gore's movie was the most impressive powerpoint presentation I've ever seen. (probably helped that it was not on powerpoint but you get the idea.) There are many fascinating presentations on the TED Talks, all using multimedia displays.
Tools can be used and they can be abused. Blame the person using them, not the tool itself. Unless it's Twitter. That's fucking worthless.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
This very moment I'm attending a lecture by a professor going through a powerpoint show at a ridiculus pace. I wish he would slow down a little so I didn't have to miss four slides to post this comment
I know at my university, most of the professors used PDF (LaTeXed) slides, or digital over-head projectors (as opposed to light-based, which requires those transparent plastic sheets). Other than that, this is fairly standard. That said, I've tended to have quite good professors so far, and most of them will use the whiteboard to show steps or diagrams, and they don't just read straight from the slides.
It's also rather useful in that all the lecture slides get posted to the course websites, so going back and reviewing the material is much easier, and means you can pay more attention in class than if you're scribbling notes hurriedly.
As a student with ADD, a math related learning disability, and problems with fine motor coordination (which prevents lots of copious legible hand writing), I found math and sciences classes taught with Chalk talk to be almost unbearable.
-- I could barely pay attention to the professor when two people behind me were discussing their previous night's experiences at the bar. I had nothing to refer to later when I was in the quiet of my own dorm room.
-- I spent all my time reduplicating the teacher's efforts of writing stuff down on the chalkboard instead of learning. This was especially difficult because for me writing was so slow.
-- Most professors can't understand that the massively mutable and non-linear world whiteboard and dry-erase marker doesn't immediately translate into the unerasable, immutable, and linear world of pen, ink, and paper. You can't easily record "write equation, erase half to show why it's wrong, and then rewrite correct half" on pen and paper. And BTW, my notebook isn't 16' long.
-- Being already starved of useful examples in my math textbooks, all the crucial examples I needed being lost of chalk talk pretty much 86'ed my chances of going for a CS degree.
Chalk talk would have been wonderful if the audio were dutifully recorded and the gradual procedures of marker strokes and half-erases were electronically transcribed and made available for later download by students such as myself. But this rarely happened in my experience.
My favorite professors use slides very well. I've done college the old fashioned way (writing on the board) and the new fangled way in my graduate classes (10 years later) and I much prefer the slides. If they're sliding past too fast, raise your hand and ask a fucking question.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Learning is easy because it's an innate human ability. Humans learn best when it's trial and error, through discovery and at their own pace. Unfortunately, that doesn't fit in with the structured classroom where everyone is forced to learn at a minimum pace and using the same materials.
Formal education is backwards and was designed for the ease of the teacher.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Powerpoint is great for showing concepts through demonstration. Videos and animations can greatly enhance the student learning process. Of course there is a right way and wrong way to do this. I've come to prefer learning via Powerpoint instead of chalk boards (ugh) or transparencies. It's a bonus if we can get the slides ahead of time to print out and bring to class. That way we can write notes on our slides during the class.
My book comes with 600+ PowerPoint slides. The first time I used them I got the worst Faculty Course Questionnaire (student rating) grade I'd ever gotten. Now I stop the slide presentation frequently to work examples or do more in-depth material on the blackboard. I also invite students to print them out 4-up and annotate them during the lecture.
If a student asks a question with any depth I also quit the presentation and go to the board. It works for me.
Reading some of the comments here, it seems as though there's a bias against PowerPoint for some ridiculous reasons. While I have read some reasons that were legitimate personal differences a person has in how they learn, I wonder if people would complain less and be more willing to learn if OpenOffice Impress were used instead of PowerPoint?
The university system rewards publications, not teaching.
While it's true that the university system rewards effective research (grants even more so than publications, in technical fields at least), it doesn't follow that teaching is therefore not rewarded. The specific standards vary from one university to another, but generally both are significant factors both in being granted tenure and promotions. Among younger professors, there's certainly an emphasis on building their research programs and finding sources of funding ... but even this isn't divorced from the educational purpose of the institution: it's central to the education of graduate students. In order to take on graduate students, a professor has to have an active research program to employ them and provide the framework for their graduate work.
And, at least at the university where I did my graduate work, I know that teaching is a real priority. Tenure has been denied to professors who had good research programs but horrid teaching assessments. My advisor was just promoted to "Curators Teaching Professor of Mechanical Engineering" - a significant promotion that is entirely based on educational merits. The teaching priority includes the teaching of upperclassmen and graduate students, not just massive gen-ed freshman lectures, and thus some success in research is necessary though not sufficient. The two aren't at odds with each other: they're complementary
I do recognize that not all universities, or all departments within universities, share exactly the same priorities. And there are certainly some lazy professors who slip through and manage to gain tenure (though not necessarily many promotions after that ...). And the concern that some professors are not skilled as instructors is a valid one. Training as an instructor, on the other hand, is primarily provided through mentoring in the advisor/graduate student relationship - if the professor under whom you study is a good educator, you'll be able to learn from him how to become one yourself. This is perhaps unfortunate for students of less skilled instructors, but given the uselessness of 95% of the educational curriculum noted above, I'm not sure the mentoring approach isn't better nonetheless.
A large part of opinion on this really comes down to how the student learns, I think. For me, I learn best by listening to a lecture, writing it down (which includes thinking about the material and summarizing / synthesizing it), and then never looking at my notes again. It's the act of writing / transferring it that works for me; the actual notes are superfluous for me afterwards. It about killed me when a professor who was big into powerpoint would quickly flip through densely packed slides -- I just couldn't absorb it and telling me not to take notes, that they were available to print out, didn't cut it. I had a couple of rough classes where the material itself wasn't bad, but I could have learned the same material in a class hour listening and notetaking that actually took me 4-5 hours to muddle through slides instead. (My undergraduate was in physics, EE, CS).
Some people, on the other hand, learned best by reading and repetition and I suppose this would work for them. Not me. Even in law school, with its horrifying amount of reading, it was the oral lectures and notetaking that cemented the material for me.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
This is nothing new. I remember a biology professor who used an overhead projector with rolls of acetate attached. The guy used a marker in one hand and cranked the roll with the other so fast you couldn't copy everything. Students would bitch and the guy would actually say "Don't worry about it.". GAH!!! It got so bad that people were stealing the roll after class to copy it.
Sounds like professors are guilty of that old taboo... not showing your work. How do the students even know if the prof understands the lecture they are giving if it's all pre-packaged?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
While it is important that there are opportunities for use of different learning styles, (such as the blogger wanting to be able to take notes during a talk) there will also be others that learn differently.
The blogger may find it best to take notes on everything that the professor is saying - there are others for whom it will be most productive to sit and listen intently and not take any notes at all.
The problem seems to be then, not the PowerPoint itself, but the pacing that the professors use. If they are to do problems on PowerPoint, they should have the steps appear gradually as they are working through the problem, and use the appropriate pacing, to ensure that students have the opportunity to follow the problem.
As for not having handouts of the PowerPoint slide, or their availability being in some way a disadvantage - I would say it's time to grow up. Adults are responsible for their own learning. If someone knows that they learn best by taking notes, then take notes anyway. The availability of the notes after the class will be something very positive for many others, and to request that the notes not be available for their sake is to fail to recognize the learning needs of others.
From the perspective of somebody who teaches liberal arts courses at a small university, I am really not keen on PowerPoint. I can see the point of it for business or conference presentations. There, the goal is to impart as much information, in as organized a manner, as possible. And speed and interactivity aren't much of an issue. But I find that a certain amount of inefficiency -- a willingness to repeat myself or to digress when needed -- is important pedagogically. It allows students to interact with me -- to ask questions that don't just get cursory answers, but shape the content of the course. And it means, as the article suggests, that students have a chance to digest a little bit while I write the important points down.
The result is that more than many of my colleagues, I end up writing on the chalkboard. Though an even better solution from my perspective is to project a blank Word document, or a Word document with just a couple of notes in it, and edit it -- take notes -- as I go along. Typing is much quicker and more readable than writing on the board, which means that rather than writing one or two words at a time, I can write full-sentence ideas, or exact quotes from students, that better reflect what is going on in class.
I can see how this might not be an optimal solution for every professor. If I had a large quantity of information that I needed to impart to students, or if I had photos or diagrams to show, I would probably do PowerPoint as well. But from the perspective of establishing an active learning environment even in a lecture setting, PowerPoint is more often than not counterproductive.
I’ve been a computer science professor for many years at a very good university, and in most of my classes I try to *only* use slides for images or diagrams that are so complicated or precise that I would not want to reproduce them by hand. Everything else is either me talking or writing on the whiteboard. Sometimes I have handwritten notes to remind me what topics I wanted to cover.
My students, for the most part, HATE this. It completely turns their expectations of a class upside down. After a few weeks, I start getting a deluge of “when are the slides going to be online” from the students who never attend class and don’t realize that there aren’t slides. Even students who *are* in class complain bitterly that they don’t have “anything to study from”. I’ve had students complain (in groups, sometimes with signed petitions) to my department chair and to my dean, saying that not providing slides creates (and I quote from one recent complaint) an “unreasonable expectation of attendance and/or note-taking”. I have fielded angry phone calls from PARENTS saying that their student isn’t doing well in my course because I’m not providing him/her with the “expected study aids”. None of this is made up.
I’ve seen identical behavior from freshmen in a required core course, seniors in a high-level elective, and graduate students in an automata-theory course. At least in the automata course they have a textbook so wonderfully clear that they really *can* learn the material from it (Sipser, and no I didn’t write it). They all crave powerpoint and suffer withdrawal when they don’t have it, because it means they have to engage in (and go to!) the lecture and not just try to cram from the slides at the last minute.
When I receive these complaints, I explain as patiently as I can that these are precisely the reasons I eschew slides, and why I value the attention and dialogue that writing and extemporaneous speaking facilitate. I think students get the point, but they didn’t come to college to think, try, and learn. They came to college so they could get a degree so they can get a job, and anything that stands in their way must be stopped.
There is an Engineering Professor who does online videos of powerpoints. In place of lectures. They drone on. It's funny, in lecture, he doesn't speak in monotone. In his PowerPoints, he does. Almost impossible to get through.
Back in the 90's, I had an accounting professor who did her whole class in PowerPoint. When I signed up and got the text books and I also needed to buy a packet of paper which had the whole semesters worth of PP slides with plenty of room to take notes. This way I never had to write down what was on the slides themselves, just my understanding of the material. And there was a lot of material.
Personally, I have a hard time paying attention to most professors talk for an hour, and I also find it inefficient. It feels like a waste of time to listen to the professor explain something out loud when I can just read it to myself in 1/2 the time. It also seems inefficient to spend time watching the professor write things that are already written in the text book. I appreciate the guidance and motivation that professors provide, but most of my actual learning comes from my textbooks and online resources.
I understand that different people have different styles of learning, and that many (or even most) people value lectures. Using power point and posting the slides online is a way for professors to accomodate both kinds of students. Students like me can still benefit from the knowledge of the professor without having to listen to a lecture, and students who want to listen to a lecture still have that option.
One of the author's main complaints seems to be that power-point lectures move too fast, but I would complain that traditional lectures move too slow. It's just a matter of different learning styles, and not all of your professors' teaching styles will match your particular learning style. That's just part of life.
Now, professors who use power-point badly are, of course, not very helpful, but that has nothing to do with power-point. Some professors just aren't the best teachers.
Perhaps your professor used a Powerpoint when he or she was teaching you about socialism or communism, because you don't seem to understand those words.
I don't have any quarrel with what the article says, for the most part. However, it falls into the same trap so many of these things do as equating bad teaching with a bad tool. It's one of my pet hates to see people dismiss Java/C++/C#/Whatever as a 'bad teaching language because ' when every one of those reasons is that it's a tool being used by a bad teacher. As someone who has been teaching programming for coming up to a decade, I find it more than a little frustrating. 'Java is a bad teaching language because it has all the standard data structures built into the library' is one such example. Sure, that's true, but there's nothing stopping you from making people roll their own. I just wish people would stop claimi
Powerpoint is not inherently bad. In fact, for what I use it for, it's an absolutely fantastic package - it is really my cue cards writ large. I don't use animations, sounds, videos (unless appropriate), diagrams, or even coloured backgrounds. It's literally just something I use for cueing my lecture. It contains perhaps 20 minutes of the 60 minutes in a regular lecture, the rest being provided by me and done via whiteboard/blackboard descriptions, contextualising, diagramming and (when I'm lucky) direct dialog with students.
Really the article is - it's bad to deliver the material of other people (I agree, but probably for different reasons). It's bad to deliver material too fast for the class (Well, yeah). It's bad to skip the important contextualising and diagramming in a lecture (sure). None of those things are flaws in powerpoint though. A bad teacher will be a bad teacher regardless. The same thing was very evident when professors taught from the same overhead slides for years. They're not going to get any better if you remove powerpoint from the equation.
You are young... Life has been kind to you. You will learn...
Damn, I wish my school administration would read this. Every time a building is remodeled, the projector screens get larger and the boards get smaller. In the newest rooms, the whiteboard is about 70cm high and 140cm wide (30" by 60") - nearly useless. Meanwhile, the projection screen is huge, six or eight times that size. I am forced to put most of my material in the presentation. There ain't no other way to do it!
While I'm venting: there are no blackboards anymore, only whiteboards. Why anyone think these abominations are progress is beyond me: the pens can't deliver ink fast enough - the first few words are nice, then they get faint and the pens don't recover until they sit for a good, long while. I suppose the suits didn't like chalk dust on their pinstripes, but give me a good quality blackboard any day.
We're getting a new school building in two years. I will probably need a magnifying glass to find the whiteboards. Assuming they haven't been eliminated entirely...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
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I've seen this a million times in the corporate world. The problem is that the speaker has never taken ANY professional speaking classes. Sure, they may know their material inside and out, but they have never been trained on actually presenting it using powerpoint. The biggest problem? The speaker does not pause.
With a "chalk talk" the speaker can only write so fast, but with ppt, they can put up a huge page of bullets/text/graphics in an instant, and the instant that material is up on the screen they immediately begin speaking. So as an attendee, what are you supposed to do? Listen to what they say or read what's on the screen?
What the speaker should do is, after putting up a slide, pause for 20seconds so the attendee can read what's up there. Sure the speaker might think they look like a moron for not saying anything, but you're allowing the attendee to digest what you just put up on the screen before you start draw the attention away from the slide and onto the speaker.
As a prof, I get to see the lovely material that comes with books. It generally sucks. The publisher takes the illustrations out of the book, has someone who clearly doesn't understand the material copy in a few bullet points, and that's it.
Anyway, the students don't need the book to be read to them. The prof needs to present a different explanation with different examples - to give a different viewpoint. Any prof who uses the slides provided with the book is not doing the job.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Chalk or dry erase boards tend to be hard to see, especially with the prof standing in front of it. Electronic presentations can display far more information in text that you can actually read with proper diagrams or photographs to illustrate a point - many of us are visual learners and accuracy makes a difference. And at the end of the lecture the profs often distribute the document by email to the class. So the speed of the lecture is irrelevant as you get THE LECTURE to take home.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I teach a little community college on the side, and make a point to use the dry-erase board far more often than the projector. It establishes a certain pace. The more involved something is, the longer it takes me to draw it, the more time the students have to digest it and take notes. It's also much more convenient to change things up on the fly in response to students' questions, needs, and interests.
That being said, I do use the projector when more detailed graphics or animations are called for, and to demonstrate live various techniques using actual software tools.
Just like anything, it's all about choosing the right tool for the job, rather than leaning towards one-size-fits-all out of expedience.
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Edward Tufte got it right some years ago. Powerpoint actually caused the failure of the space shuttle Columbia.
Just show these articles to your faculty...
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html
http://spectrum.troy.edu/~rbeaver/PPEvil.html
Might do some good.
If you have a copy of the formulas and such, it's much easier to ask questions and absorb things since you don't have to furiously write things down. The Navier-Stokes equations, for example. Routh tables, for another.
The best class I had in college was an Aeronautics class where the professor had us buy the notes at the local copy center. That was one of the few classes, despite being one of the most complex, that I did well in that semester.
I am an adjunct instructor teaching Microsoft Excel classes at the community college and found that textbook PowerPoint files were absolutely horible. Aside from that, it does not lend itself to actual demonstration of the skill or for discussion. For hands on classes, there is definately something to be said for actual demonstration, not half-assed screen captures or videos that don't adapt to actual student questions.
In the end, for me, based on the quality and flexibility it just wasn't worth it, even though my lecture prep does take longer than just punting with the vendor's resources.
The only pro is that students could print them, but instead I offer them copies of my lecture notes which are my "digestion" of the text and the examples I'm going to be using in lecture which have a far more conversational tone and step-by-step walkthrough than bullet points and animations.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
I remember those. Both the slide and filmstrip versions. And, yes, you are showing your age.
Do you remember the math programs with the 16 RPM records that presented the test?
I also had one of those "dual action" professors. Also, one that would make arrows on the chalkboard for what we now call bullet points. They looked, well, rude. "====D" is about as close as I can get on a keyboard.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I would direct any professor to this link: http://lifehacker.com/323554/stop-death-by-powerpoint I have my executives go through this before attempting to create their presentation.
I'll reiterate some important points made by others above. (a) Most teaching faculty today are not full-time professors, but rather part-timers with no job security and no benefits and working at multiple schools (i.e., no guarantee that any work put into lectures won't be completely wasted effort when they get let go in the next semester). This has been done in the last 20 years so as to skirt union membership and therefore pay them a lot less. (b) Frequently teaching assignment are given with a few days before the semester, and such part-time faculty are in a desperate straight to use any pre-published aids to get the class up and running. (c) Full-time research faculty are themselves neither hired, assessed, nor rewarded for good teaching.
In fact, I had one job interview for a full-time teaching position and I made the mistake of saying, "I'm a really good teacher and all my student evaluations are very high". The response from the dean across the table at that was, "All I hear is a bunch of bullshit."
So those things above are all probably the most important, but here's one more log for the fire. Same dean as above (for whom I worked part-time) has a "support" meeting and one of they things he did was make a really heavy-handed push to use PowerPoint. See, administration really loves capital improvements (new building, pricey new lab, new equipment, etc.). One example was this expensive laser setup that no one had any use for and was just pushed in a corner under a tarp for years. Likewise, both schools I've taught at go in the direction of removing chalkboards to buy expensive computer video projection setups in the classrooms (from some given vendor).
Any here's what the dean said: "People love technology. We have all this great new technology, use it, somehow. We have video projectors in the classrooms, so use PowerPoint or browse the Web or something to show that off to people."
Anyway, I took a poll in my classes to see if students like PowerPoint lectures, it came back about 2/3 negative, so I don't do that.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
In my first year at law school I had a contracts professor who knew his material very well. He got behind some in the first semester, so in the second semester he presented material at a rapid pace. I wasn't getting it that well. One day I taped his class (or somebody taped it for me, I can't recall) and listened to it later. Then, I could slow it down and digest what he said at my own pace. I was surprised. The presentation was brilliant and awesome.
When I told him that, the professor was visibly chagrined. His problem was that he just didn't have enough time.
I don't think that presentation software is the problem. The problem is the same back as when I was in law school. For many people, it isn't enough for the teacher to explain the point. The teacher often needs to explain the point, hammer it home, illustrate it in various contexts, deconstruct it, reassemble it, then blow it up and do it once again.
When a teacher asks questions, it shouldn't be to fuck with the student. The only valid reason for a teacher to ask questions is to help the teacher figure out if the students are getting what he's saying. If they're not, the teacher's job is to REORIENT himself/herself and approach the material from a different tack. In other words, lecturing is not enough. The teacher needs to LISTEN.
When PowerPoint divorces the teacher from getting student feedback, then PowerPoint is mightily bad. When PowerPoint is used interactively with the students, it can be mighty good.
PowerPoint should be used like music sequencing software. You should have multiple clips that you can use to explain the same point in different ways, if necessary. Forcing the lecturer to make clip selection decisions, will force the lecturer to interact with his students and listen to them. This can only add to the quality of the presentation.
Anyway, my two cents worth.
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Sometimes the lecturers are forced to do this kind of inane crap, especially if they're new. My wife's friend has been teaching at a community college for a couple years, and apparently the school mandated that, since they installed these fancy computers in all the classrooms, the lecturers better either get tenure or start using the computers for all their teaching aides.
Let's face it. When graduates get out into the "real word", they'll be sitting through presentations by their managers and peers that are just as bad, if not worse (ever see a presentation where a research type includes tables so big that you couldn't read them on screen from the front row with a telescope?). Just think of it as practical life experience. They'll be ready for the workplace!
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
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... when I was a physics student. But really, it wasn't a problem - if he tried whipping through the transparencies (which, naturally, consisted of lots of equations) too quickly, someone would just stop him. Then again, our physics classes were pretty small. If you this were happening in Calc 101 in a lecture hall with 250 people, it might be more of a problem to get the speed under control.
Professors who use transparencies or just mindlessly copy from their notes to the blackboard give crappy lectures. In many cases, I actually read the text and find it's lots more useful than the lecture, as the lecture is often punctuated by the professor's various ticks and tangents. What I can't stand is when special information is only available in the otherwise pointless damn lecture. I've generally come to prefer online courses with pre-recorded lectures that I can search and fast forward through, but universities always find some way for their new, gee-whiz multimedia technology and DRM to get in the way of the lesson plan. Sad, considering how many universities there are out there and how many mediocre professors there are offering online courses when MIT OpenCourseWare is free as in "free". I can't stand universities.
PowerPoint doesn't make bad presenters any worse, or good presenters any better. I used PowerPoint when I taught a Java programming class, and basically had to spend more time preparing the slides than actually giving the lectures. I also posted the slides on the college web site after every lecture. Whiteboards were still used to illustrate the answers to questions from students -- and there were a lot of questions. There are a lot of reasons I sucked as a teacher (talking in a monotone, trying to teach both students who already know C and those who had no programming experience whatsoever, having a really crappy textbook forced on us by the college, etc.) But I don't think PowerPoint made me any worse. If anything, it was much easier to read than my handwriting on a whiteboard, as well as allowing me to cover more material.
Back in the day, we had a Calculus professor who would write with his right hand while erasing with his left -- making it virtually impossible to simultaneously take notes and understand what he what talking about. Personally, I think canned lectures are an improvement.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The tool isn't a bad thing; they just need to be able to use it right. I had the honor of taking CS60A from John Osterhout at UC Berkeley, and while he didn't use PowerPoint, it was clear that his lectures were pre-planned to a T.
How did I know this? The reader he recommended that we purchase was his lecture notebook that he planned to use during class. So as a student, I could do the reading, show up to class with the reader, follow along and make whatever notes I needed to, but I didn't have to waste time writing down what he was saying because it was already there. I just wrote down my own clarifications.
And this high level of preparation did not lead to rigidity; in fact, compared to other professors I had in similarly-sized classes, he was more flexible than most, leaving a lot of time for interactive questions from his students.
I wish all professors did the same thing. I spent a lot of my energy in most lecture classes writing things down instead of digesting, which would have been a more appropriate use of the time. I guess it could be argued that some people learn better by writing things down, but I think there are limits to that.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Also, because PP is a horrible tool, badly suited for the job it is intended for - and routinely abused for jobs it wasn't.
I've seen PowerPoint and Keynote presentations right next to and/or immediately following each other. That's a difference you can't put into words. I've seen people who know how to work the tool and people who wear a suit and sit at a desk all day with "manager" on their door sign present, and it's another world of difference. I've seen people use presentation software for presentations, and for practically every other purpose, including the agenda of a meeting.
Add all that up, and the range is unbelievable. People who only know four programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) and still insist on creating their presentations themselves are a total failure, and they don't even notice. But their audience does. And if you're trying to put facts, figures and formulas into a medium that was meant for more condensed information, it only gets worse.
Every university, and almost every company would profit considerably if they were to just wipe out powerpoint on all their machines and prevent re-installation. I'm serious.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I had professors teaching 300 and 400 level classes in Java who have never programmed a line of java in their life. Not just one professor, many. Whenever you asked them a question they would defer it until next class and then never answer it. Their slides where their life blood. If they could not get the power point to display, class would be canceled. And this would happen often, due to a poor IT department. In my view professors, are people that couldn't find a real job after graduating so they never left. This is a fact you will have to live with, and this is why so many professor have such poor knowledge. I graduated from Drexel in CS, but I am guessing that many school may have this problem. It seems to me, that either a very low, or very high end school would have the best professors. Since the low end would employ people who have full time jobs, and teach in their spare time, and high end actually care about what they are doing. By far the best teachers I had where dedicated TAs, Adjuncts, or Wikipedia.
I just completed a class, and it was my first experience in a completely PowerPoint based lecture scenario. Sure, he jotted occasional notes on the board, but in about 50 hours of lecture I managed to only take about 15 pages of notes (including labnotes). I see the use of PowerPoint as a pro since it gives profs the option of making them available to students, so if you're sick or miss a day then you're not scrambling to borrow notes from someone else. But I actually think it's more of a con since my prof didn't really adhere to his slides, and by week 3 we were already 2 weeks behind. The end result was him giving us the slides and telling us to read them on our own. Gee, I could have stayed home and done that myself. So while it makes it easier for students to stay caught up, it just seems to make the profs less likely to stick to their material. Or, less likely to put as much effort into teaching it. I'd rather handwrite notes off a chalkboard any day.
PowerPoint wasn't in use when I was in college, but that didn't stop *some* professors from having the same pre-printed materials on overhead sheets that they presented each semester. Blame the individuals, not the technology.
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I've also seen it done very well.
My History professor, the power points are brief talking points. It's the stuff a good professor would have on index cards in the days before power point. Well, what most would have as the title for the index card. They help keep the lectures and peoples notes organized, but do not come close to substituting for either. If you expect to pass by copying and studying the power points, you'll fail hard.
The lesson is presented in the lecture. If he needs to present any substantial information visually, he'll go to the whiteboard, though he does often put useful charts up on the power point, and has used his image choices as starting points for class discussion. His lessons are better with the power points, but there was one time in his Western Civ class where he left his flash drive at home. He went on and presented the lecture pretty much as he would any other day, we just didn't have convenient headers for different sections of our notes that day.
I'm really impressed with how he handles Power Point. It is a tool that definitely improves his ability to teach the class, but he uses other tools as well in a well integrated way. And he can function pretty well without it should he need to. The tool is strictly subordinate to the goal. This makes it both more useful and less necesary.
Most others though, they try to cram all the material in the power point and read it nearly verbatim. I have trouble seeing the point in even attending class, just download the power points and read them myself.
The problem is when you have talented researchers spending their time teaching instead of researching. They don't want to do it, they're not any good at it, and the students are just as well off learning from the book. Send the prof back to the lab where his valuable skills won't go to waste.
Who is forcing them to take jobs that involve teaching? Many of these people seem to regard teaching as a simplistic and tiresome chore that they have to "put up with" in order to be able to do their research. The truth is that firstly, teaching isn't a trivial task and, secondly, just because somebody has a high IQ and does brilliant research it doesn't mean that person can teach worth a damn. There is no easier way to loose the respect of a room full of students than if you expect them to learn a mountain of material to perfection but it is painfully obvious to them that you yourself are not as familiar with that material as you should be. Unfortunately too many bright researchers who are forced to teach alongside their research discover the hard way that when you have been doing sophisticated research for a long while and you haven't spent much time thinking about "basic stuff" for a while you can get rusty. So, don't get me wrong, If you gave me the task of teaching, say, geometry to a bunch of high-school kids I'd probably have to refresh my maths knowledge. I'll freely admit to being a bit rusty stuff like that after having worked as a programmer for many years but you can bet your ass I'd come to class prepared to answer any question the kids could throw at me. If you don't they'll eat you alive. People who primarily want to do research should principally not take jobs that involve teaching unless they are willing to commit the kind of time and effort to teaching that it demands. I'm sure there are plenty of research institutes and corporations that would gladly hire them and spare them the torture of having to teach.
Just my two cents.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I've struggled with this issue for about ten years of being a full-time prof. I've created powerpoints for all of my courses, but mostly I've gone back to chalk, and I use the powerpoints either when I have a particularly interesting bunch of slides, or (I shamefully admit) when I need to rush through a topic.
The first thing to recognize is that every student learns differently. I've had students who love the powerpoints and students who hate them and everything in between. When I taught in Ethiopia, my students all asked for the slides in advance so they could go through them and look up words. In general, foreign students with poor English skills like them.
My initial reason for wanting to make powerpoint slides was actually because my students were horrible notetakers. I saw making slides as a way to ensure that even a horrible notetaker would be able to study the material. For this reason, I still keep the slides for the course posted to my web site even though I only use them in class maybe 20 or 30 percent of the time.
The biggest problem with using the slides is just the student attention span. For whatever reason, you pay more attention to someone who's writhing his hands around and scribbling stuff on the board. Otherwise, I think that what I write on the board is actually less comprehensible than my slides.
By the way, I think that the profs who use the pre-packaged slides tend to be either (1) adjunct faculty or (2) teaching the course for the first time. So it's probably not the slides; they probably really do have less knowledge of the material, or at least of how it should be presented.
The poster linked to some great PPTs on learning.
In one slide, entitled "How Well Do We Remember What We Learn in School?" there are three bullet points with a total of nine lines of text (p12).
Incomprehensible.
I was tech support for a Symposium on coaching. I had one NHL vet coach all ready to go, laptop on podium, powerpoint loaded, just hit the button. He did not know what to do. So we had a volunteer sit behind him in a chair, at the back of the stage. Every time the coach snapped his fingers this guy hit the button on the mouse. Funniest thing I ever saw, blah blah blah...snap...new slide...blah blah blah...snap...new slide...
"Please, Fry I don't know how to use PowerPoint! I'm a professor!"
In 33 years I've met two teachers in my life. Being employed by a school, stuck in front of a class with a ciriculum doesn't make you a teacher, professor, or instructor; at best it makes you a baby sitter.
I have great sympathy for students today, they'll likely never know what it is like to have a teacher, a real teacher. This PowerPoint issue brings about a great point in the nature of teaching (or in most cases the lack of) and what it means to teach. Lecturing is not teaching. But my quote to my students comes to mind:
"I am the teacher.
You are the student.
It is my job to teach, your job to learn.
It is not my job to learn the material for you.
My job is to take the vast array of information you are to learn, package it, and hand it out and ensure you understand what is in the package.
Your job is to take that package, unwrap it, and figure out how all the parts inside fit together. If you do not understand a part, I will explain it. I will not, however, explain how they fit together, that is what you are here to do. That is learning. If I tell you how those parts fit together, then you have learned nothing but the right answer to a question, that is memorization. You are not here to memorize information; books are a far superior method of recording information. Does anyone here not understand the difference?"
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
What about Apple iWork/KeyNote?
When I was in college in the 80s, there was a prof who used two overhead projectors, each of which had a scroll of prewritten class notes. He scrolled one page then the next, going so fast that if you wrote extremely fast, you could almost write down the relevant points. You had a choice of that or listening to what he was saying.
Worst class ever. Something like a 60% drop rate for that class, and it was a senior level class required for graduation.
As a current ECE undergrad, I have a few things to say.
Yes, power point (and other computer technologies) are very useful for specific tasks, such as presenting videos, showing complicated graphs, and long code listings.
But when it comes to learning and understanding, and especially learning the theory behind a method, watching the professor work it out with chalk (or markers, whatever) is immensely more valuable than seeing the results print, phrase-by-phrase, on a screen.
Add this to the fact that power point presenters typically dim the lights, mumble the words on the screen, and typically have a 5-minute overhead time spent "playing with the computer" trying to find their files, figure out why the font is wrong, etc.
Many have pointed out that it comes down to the quality of the teacher. And this is true. But to link causality to cause, if the teacher relies too heavily on powerpoint, they probably suck at teaching with any method.
Learning from a all powerpoint lecture is sort of like learning from a set of flashcards. Are they really that different? Except for animations or mulit-page code listings, they're about the same, and equally "useful".
Some have pointed out that powerpoint is great if you want to download the notes on your own time. This is true, but going to class and taking your own notes is much more useful. If your notes aren't clear, or you missed class that day, then ask a friend for a copy of the notes. It's that simple, and part of normal "group studying" anyway. Heck, you could even read the text book, do the homework, and go to office hours in the worst case...
We had one prof who would start out with about five chalkboards worth of notes. If you didn't get to class about five minutes early, you'd never catch up before he/she (we weren't quite sure) started erasing stuff. Eventually, one of the more entrepreneurial students brought a Polaroid to class and took pictures of the chalkboards. Don't remember what the rate was... maybe $5 per class. Of course kids these days could just bring their iPhone and take all the pictures they wanted and record the lecture, too. The only reason many of us got an A in that class was because anybody who helped him/her move apartments at the end of the semester got an A.
All the professors I had in college used PowerPoint correctly. I was a CS major so perhaps my professors PowerPoint literacy rate was better than average.
My professors would make their own short slides and use each slide as a launching point for that part of the lecture. I would print the slides in note taking format prior to class and supplement the lecture with handwritten notes. I always thought it was a great way to learn.
I use OpenOffice for all my course content: slides, handouts, exams, diagrams.... For physics both the built in equation editor or the ability to embed editable LaTeX (via OooLatex) make it vastly superior to MS Office despite being slightly less polished. The other advantage is that I have a Makefile to automatically generate PDF files with one slide and 2x2 slides versions. If I could get OO to run in batch without needing an X11 connection to somewhere (even though it does not open a window!) I could probably embed the whole thing into Moodle and have it generate PDFs to student specifications on the fly.
Kids these days can't even sit through a 2 hour movie in a theater without talking or using their cell phone. And yet we want to pretend that entertaining them will solve discipline problems in the classroom. So $100M budgets don't make up for lack of discipline either.
My theory of education as I prepare to be a teacher is to stick the standards in the classroom and have plenty of extra credit (not applied unless you otherwise pass the class) for students to have fun applying what they're getting out of the class. As a math teacher it's possible to use Pokemon, D&D, Fantasy Football, Science, Programming, Cooking, etc as extra credit assignments. Things which interest individual students. And also extra credit for struggling students so they can catch up and be rewarded for their efforts.
This way students understand that if they don't put in the effort to learn the "fun" will be out of reach. You can't play on the field if you don't practice or even know how to play. You can blame the teacher for not being "fun" enough but ultimately the student is responsible for their own work ethic.
Work Safe Porn
The last thing I want my students doing is mindlessly copying stuff - I want them engaging their brains and thinking about the content which is something that is not easy to achieve! In addition to the use of clickers and questions in the lecture, to relieve the writing part I make the OpenOffice (no PowerPoint!) slides available on the website along with a video podcast of the lecture audio and the computer screen. This lets students listen again to any part they found hard to understand... or to catch up if they "accidentally" miss a lecture!
Unfortunately slides are only part of the issue and I do a good bit of writing on the whiteboard as well (derivations, answers to student questions which need diagrams etc.). So far I have found no easy way to capture this - I know that there are solutions but the ones I have found are not portable and since I lecture in different rooms from term-to-term they are not viable.
In terms of slides bundled with the books a lot of the text books for low level, high enrolment courses come with such material for the professor. Personally I find the slides a complete waste of time - all they are is pictures from the book with a few bullet points. The exception are the concept question slides which can occasionally be useful. In addition to this publishers also provide all the diagrams in electronic form which is what I usually make use of - although I more often draw my own instead.
"Humans learn best when it's trial and error, through discovery and at their own pace"
How quickly people forget there are 24 hours in the day and 2 days on the weekend and only 50-60 minutes in a given class. The teacher's job is to present the material that needs to be learned. It's up to the student to learn it on their own time by doing homework and reading the text. Teacher's can aid the learning process by directing students but they cannot make a student learn anything.
And all methods work given the right students. Everybody learns in a different way. A teacher cannot teach the same lesson 30 different ways. They have to pick a method and everyone in the class has to deal with it. Ultimately the student does the real learning, not in the classroom, but on their own time.
Work Safe Porn
I lecture by writing on the chalkboard using notes on my laptop, which I then post online. I'll occasionally connect to a projector to show a nice graphic or something, but for a serious technical lecture I really think the chalk is better. It's slower, and it's plainer, so there's less form to distract from the meaning.
The thing about teaching is that it's a really enormous time sink. Preparing a lecture in a course you're teaching for the first time can easily require four to six hours preparation time per hour of lecturing. That makes one three-hour-per-week lecture into a 20-hour job in itself, and with research and administration to do as well, a professor at an R1 institution will be burning midnight oil to keep ahead of the class. A higher teaching load is just as bad.
By the second or third time giving a course, prep time can go down to around 1:1 prep:lecture time. At this point you still have to put in about equal time thinking through your notes ahead of time, or you won't be able to explain them clearly to the class. Maybe after further repetitions the prep time drops further; I don't know yet.
This huge ratio of prep to performance time is probably largely due to the fact that professors are researchers; but not because this makes them uninterested in teaching. It's because the sort of person who ends up in an academic career is the sort of person who, having to teach that 2 + 2 = 4, can't help spending six solid hours trying to find a way to derive addition from logic and then present that derivation through an analogy with farm animals.
When I taught high school physics back in the 90's I would use a power point lecture with notes. It made it easier to make sure each class got the same content and it was easy to include animations and things to help comprehension. It was also good when a student missed class, I could give them a copy of the lecture on floppy.
A tablet PC plus a projector and Office One Note (or some of the other math focused notebook software) is waaaay better than a blackboard.
First, you have limitless history. A student has a question about a lecture last week? Boom - You got it.
Colors, resizing, searching through handwritten notes as if they were typed? Adding pictures? Printing documents to One Note (such as lab write ups) and then marking on them to illuminate the finer points?
Plus - and to me this is HUGE - you can face your students while writing!
And if you have a wireless projector you can walk around! and still write on the board! Being were you need to be, a while writing where your students can see!!!
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
What's PowerPoint? My Profs use LaTeX with the beamer package...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
"Conclusion? Chalk Talk rules for fundamental science teaching. Powerpoint is probably OK for management theory classes.
And all the other domains of knowledge out there? Where does the history of art fit into your model? psychology? or perhaps medicine or law? As a PhD student I'd hope you'd see the world isn't that simple, and actually it's quite complex...
No. An "opinion" in science is no good -- a statement must be supported by structured observation.
This confusion happens because your primary source of science news is people who studied journalism.
Your post suggests that the development of grammar and spelling skills is not incredible.
I doubt you have the mathematical background necessary to survive MS-level engineering classes. Or did you mean MCSE? FYI, nobody would hire someone for an engineering position if all the candidate has is an MCSE.
Humanities didn't give us equipment for real-time communication over long distance. Humanities didn't teach us to navigate on open ocean. Humanities didn't teach us to make metal tools. Humanities didn't teach us to build bicycles, cars, or airplanes. Humanities didn't design the infrastructure modern life relies on. Humanities just gives us something to do in the free time that technical work has created.
You should learn why you have the opportunity to enjoy life.
I may be late to the party here, but I thought I'd add my two cents.
Panopto (http://www.panopto.com) makes lecture-capture software that helps address this problem. Students may not get the most from their classroom experience for reasons ranging from speaker pacing to vision problems to inadequate AV resources, and as a result there is a need for them to be able to review classroom material on their own, at their own pace. Panopto is in use at hundreds of universities for both classroom lecture capture and ad-hoc instructor (or even student!) presentation recording, and it serves equally well as a study/review tool and a means for students who missed class to catch up.
One of the core features of the software is automatic tracking of PowerPoint slide changes, providing an instant index into a long recording. If a student misunderstands one slide, he or she can easily seek directly to that part of the lecture and watch it again. It won't fix a bad lecture, but it can help students get the most from a rapid-fire presentation that was delivered too quickly for the audience to absorb.
Here's a link to their showcase of content: http://www.panopto.com/showcase.aspx. I strongly recommend the Thomas Friedman and Lawrence Lessig lectures.
When you consider how much well-deserved ridicule has been levelled at PowerPoint and it's users by people with outstanding communications credentials, how is it than anyone can fire up a "deck" without being laughed out of the room?
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
PowerPoint, Whiteboards, Chalk, etc are just tools. Professors have been good and bad at implementing tools since the beginning of time.
Sure. But what if chalk is put to good use 99% of the time and powerpoint is put to good use 1% of the time?
Will you still say "They're just tools"? Or would you wish that something could be done about the 99% bad uses of powerpoint? What if each of your professors used powerpoint and you got a poorer education as a consequence. Are they still "just tools"?
Note: I don't have any evidence that it's 99%-vs-1%; or even just that it's 99%. But I think the argument "they're just tools" is not good enough to disengage your critical thinking.
who gives a shit what carolyn thinks
There's a review section on my university's website.
It provides seful comments, but they haven't put the last few quarters' classes into the system.
(That system also enables you to make sure that a class reviewer actually took the class they're reviewing)
Our in-class end-of-quarter evaluations tend to focus a bit much on simply filling in a bubble for a Likert scale - style question.
BTW, ratemyprofessors loses some respect with their "hot or not" rating component.
One of my comments on the sci-fi poll further expresses that sentiment:
"I, too, like looking at attractive women, but in terms of a movie, sporting event, et cetera, I want to see that main event, and see it done well, not just more T&A."
(Not saying I haven't had classes with attractive profs or TAs, just saying that I'm not irrational enough to factor that into my decision making.)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I've had bad classes with PowerPoint, good classes with it, bad classes without it, and good classes without it. It's a bit different mix every quarter
(1-1-1-2)
(2-0-1-2)
(0-3-0-1)
(1-2-1-0)
(1-1-0-2)
(0-2-0-2)
(0-1-0-2)
Total 5-10-3-11
My statistics professor, incidentally one of the non-users, might like it that I'm thinking of a multifactor regression analysis and a chi-square versus-equal-proportions test here. :P
Yes, my professors have been known to use the textbook publisher's PowerPoints. However, even if they don't edit the file, they "edit" the way they present it - they will skip or gloss over content from the slides that they don't feel is necessary. So it saves them some grunt work in assembling PowerPoints, even if they know what to talk about.
The one professor this quarter who was a big PowerPoint user had other qualities to redeem his teaching style - real-world experience and unusual-but-still-valuable out-of-class assignments.
Even if the professor made the slide deck available, I still would like to take notes during the lecture itself rather than take notes as I'm going through the slides myself.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I often bring my laptop to a "regular" class.
Even with access to FireFox, FreeCiv and the like, which I do use, I still pay attention. (Using that same laptop to type notes keeps me form zoning out too far.)
Sometimes, I have classes in desktop computer labs. One is a statistics class doing a lot of work with Minitab, so that one makes sense. However, the professor recently discovered filtering/Internet-blocking software, which blows. Now I'm literally falling asleep during some of those lectures; I don't think that's entirely a coincidence.
I'm more likely to stay awake at home because I can surf the Internet. Maybe the same principle is at work. (often too damn late at night, but that's another issue.)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
As a grad student teaching Intro To Programming in Ada (mid 90's), I also used self-prepared transparency sets, and handed out complete copies to my students. This was way more helpful to my students than forcing them to scribble down copies of stuff I wrote on the blackboard. They could focus on what I was talking about, rather than practicing to be extras in some sad dark ages movie playing monks hand copying the Bible. I know it was more helpful to them because I asked them, and a majority said they preferred
But I also didn't machine gun them with 94 slides for a 50 minute class. We would stay on one slide for quite some time, and while we talked about it, they would have their own copies to make additional notes on.
Just wanted to let you all know about this article that is related to the issue posted in Carolyns blogg. IDF tells officers: Lose the PowerPoint presentations http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090908.html
Everything said there could also be said of church services in the US. The effect is very similar.
I could go on a long rant. Fortunately, someone already has: Why Johnny can't preach.
One extreme of "bad powerpoints" certainly has been discussed here - in short, "those giant walls of text."
However, a lot of advice I hear on 'good powerpoints' (including the advice from the communication class I'm in this quarter) is to make the slides concise. Really concise, to the point where I feel that the summary provided by such a slide deck is too short.
It's really frustrating to try and write such a concise summary of your work. (I admit to going on too much about the details, but still...)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.