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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."
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.
Conclusion? Chalk Talk rules for fundamental science teaching. Powerpoint is probably OK for management theory classes.
At least you can print PowerPoints. I had numerous good teachers print out all the slides in the 'notes' layout. Where 1/2 the page was the slide and the other half was blank. 3 hole punch it and toss it in your folder.
1) It kept you from wasting time replicating something that already existed
2) You could still mark it up in your own words so that you knew what it meant.
Some even had tablet PCs that they would write on the presentation and send out that marked up version after class.
PowerPoint, Whiteboards, Chalk, etc are just tools. Professors have been good and bad at implementing tools since the beginning of time.
One of the best professors I knew came to class with only 4 color markers. No prepared notes, no book, no equation sheet. The school rewarded him with a semester off because too many of my idiotic classmates failed his class one semester. (Where as classes in the previous 20 semesters he taught seemed to muster up at least 80% passing).
True. In high school I had teachers who would either use the same overhead slides for years or worse, write the same notes on the board and never explain anything. Currently I'm in college and I'm taking a programming course where the prof reads each slide quickly and goes to the next within seconds. Worse, while she fortunately takes questions, she unfortunately neither knows nor cares about the material. Luckily I already know C
I do not have a sig. You are hallucinating.
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.
At least you can print PowerPoints. I had numerous good teachers print out all the slides in the 'notes' layout. Where 1/2 the page was the slide and the other half was blank. 3 hole punch it and toss it in your folder.
1) It kept you from wasting time replicating something that already existed 2) You could still mark it up in your own words so that you knew what it meant.
I've been guest lecturing in a couple of grad level classes for the past 4.5 years while working on my PhD and I used to do what you indicate here. However, I found that students would skip class, space out while I was speaking, and fail to ask questions when I wasn't being clear enough for them. By the 2nd class no one was taking any notes. Even when I went off script and indicated that they needed to take notes on what I was saying.
The last couple of times I've used PPT, but refused to print out the slides in any form (Except for a student who missed a bunch of time while sick, but I made sure to impress upon her the importance of getting the notes from someone else). By doing this grades have gone up despite me using the same basic slides and covering the same material. Forcing them to actually take handwritten notes means they get the experiential learning of writing the material down at least once.
One of the best professors I knew came to class with only 4 color markers. No prepared notes, no book, no equation sheet. The school rewarded him with a semester off because too many of my idiotic classmates failed his class one semester. (Where as classes in the previous 20 semesters he taught seemed to muster up at least 80% passing).
My advisor teaches this way. I always thought it was just him being too behind the times, but now I know that forcing us to take handwritten notes as he writes out the material on the overhead helps them learn the material and stay focused on what's going on in class.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Well, that depends how you look at it. Nothing annoys me more then profs who always cater to the lowest common denominator in the class room. They spend half the class going over trivial details of the material because of a minority of people who just don't get it. At some point a prof has to just let some students sink or swim. The worst was an operating systems class I took. I was very excited to take it after seeing the course outline. Unfortunately, the prof catered too much to the people who just didn't put in the effort outside of class, so we only covered half the material we were suppose to. Very disappointing... You have a set of students who really want to learn the material and take something away, and instead the class' time is wasted on those that just want a passing mark.
I was shocked when I started working in academia how most people did anything they could to avoid dealing with students. Of course, when you are a student you make the mistake of assuming that universities are there for the benefit of students - when at best they are regarded by most academics as a pool of potential slaves/grad students to assist with their own careers. Inevitably, after a few years I was behaving in exatly the same way.
One of my professors once said (in lecture) that students are probably the only consumer group that mostly wants less for their money. Its sad but true that most students these days care more about the piece of paper they receive at the "end" of their "education" than they do about actually learning anything. The universities exploit that by making sure that they get less while charging top dollar in tuition and paying the professors squat. Surely this cannot continue forever before the corporations figure out that degrees from "prestigious" universities do not live up to their mythical reputations.