The perils of Powerpoint

One of my lecturers had a series of slides (done using LaTeX, I think) with something close to bullet points, and a totally different set of handouts which looks more like a chapter from a book. That probably requires more effort to do, though.

The problem is not powerpoint, the problem is how some people use powerpoint. If you use powerpoint just to outline the structure of your lecture, and to write down some key definitions, and perhaps also use it to show some key graphs etc. (for the empirical social scientists), then it can be a very useful tool. You don’t have to look at your notes on paper (at least not all the time), and hence you can talk through rather than read your lecture. Moreover, it’s easy to earn powerpoint very quickly, which is always a plus for time-deprived academics. Hence I really fail to appreciate why so many people complain about powerpoint in general, rather than about some particular use of it.

ingrid, that’s the classic defence of PP, that it can’t be responsible for anything bad about a presentation. To me, that abdication of responsibility is the greatest possible condemnation of the software, not a defence. If it doesn’t facilitate a better presentation than the speaker could have written on transparencies with a packet of coloured pens, or composed using a versatile word processor, then transferred to slides, then it is a piece of software that offers no added value.

Which raises the question, if it wasn’t bundled into MSOffice with the word processor and the spreadsheet, two applications that have value, would anyone pay hundreds of dollars to acquire it as a stand-alone?

Having said that, there clearly are risks in getting carried away. I recently spent three hours putting together an animation for a Powerpoint presentation, and then found (when I had to remove the animation because I was giving the presentation again and it had to be saved as PDF) that when I only used a few selected frames from the animation the presentation as a whole was much improved. But I still think the lesson is to use the bells and whistles wisely, not that there shouldn’t be bells and whistles at all.

I think you’re the one who’s being harsh, Derek. Look at Javascript and Flash – two technologies that were ridiculed for a long time because people simply didn’t know how to use them properly. Now, as time has passed, people have figured out how to use JS in a way that’s not annoying, and are working on Flash as well (which suffers the disadvantage of being available to advertisers).

The problem is fusty old academics who don’t care about learning the technology, and/or whose lecturing technique would be poor in any other circumstances, likely because they don’t actually give a toss about teaching.

If they cared, they would read a few articles on the web about “how to use powerpoint” most of which are filled with eminently sensible tips like “don’t write your entire presentation onto them”.

In short: guns don’t kill people, rappers do.

sanbikinoraion, that’s just “they laughed at Galileo”. You give examples of javascript and Flash, but give no examples of the “killer application” of Powerpoint, instead asking the readers to take it on faith that one will appear some day in the future. You say PP is Galileo, I say it’s Bozo the Clown.

Eh, the Flash example doesn’t even hold. Early versions of Flash had no interactive capability whatsoever; it was only starting from v2 that Flash had sound capability; text edit boxes came in only during v4; and it wasn’t until v5 that Flash had full scripting capability. Just because people can do fun stuff with newer versions of Flash doesn’t mean that early versions of Flash didn’t indeed suck.

Similarly, PowerPoint might become equally useful if M$ adds more useful features to it in the future, but that’s not exactly a defence of the _present_ incarnations of PowerPoint.

Chris writes, “Jo’s key complaint, though, is about what PP does for spontaneity.”

Take a look at CounterPoint

CounterPoint is a zooming presentation tool that acts as a plugin to PowerPoint. It allows you to arrange your PowerPoint slides on a zooming canvas… CounterPoint also provides the capability to create multiple scripted paths through your spatial slide arrangements. Presentations created in CounterPoint are also interactive, so you can deviate from a scripted path at presentation-time based on audience feedback, time constraints, or other factors.

I’ve never used it, but I’ve seen it demonstrated. Looks like a good way to get at the spontaneity that PP locks you out of.

The solution to this problem is to do what I do, which is to not have your lecture ready until just before class. It’s especially good if you can finish it on the bus ride to the university and then can’t read your own notes because of the even worse than normal hand-writting from the bouncing of the bus. If you’re desperately finishing your lecture on the way to give it you have no time to think about powerpoint or handouts or anything but pleanty of chance to be “spontaneous”. (I suppose if you’ve given your lectures more times than I have then this is harder to do.)

Hi,

Richard Feynman on bullets during the Challenger investigation: “Then we learned about ‘bullets’; little black circles in front of phrases that were supposed to summarize things. There was one after another of these little goddamn bullets in our briefing books and on the slides.”

Have a nice day,
Antti

none of you guys write on the blackboard?

In really big rooms this isn’t always feasible (there are some technical issues about one of my classrooms that affect this), but in smaller rooms I pretty much always do this.

I’m not so stupid that I can’t follow and retain what you’re saying

I do find that having something to look at helps me follow and retain.

I don’t know how Jo does his lectures, but one thing it is pretty hard to get away without (given student expectations and all that) is the handout . And once you’ve given them a handout then they either know where you’re going or you’ll confuse the hell out of them if you go somewhere else. How does Powerpoint make things any worse in this respect?

The handout is some sort of mysterious document with an ambigious relationship to the lecture–is it an outline? Background information? The powerpoint slides are more directly connected to the lecture content.

I’ve been experimenting this term with “free” lecturing–no powerpoint or handouts, occasionally writing something on the board but basically just talking. Generally, I’m rated by students as a pretty good lecturer, but this term I’m getting better reviews than usual, along with a conviction that it would be even better if I had slides.

@4 – I agree completely. If people are willing to invest a little extra time in structuring their presentations, PowerPoint has the advantage of:

– Being neater and more legible than handwriting
– Easily creating fairly complex graphics and charts
– Being easily distributable
– Occuring before you actually need it, thus consuming no actual presentation time in writing

The blackboard (or whiteboard) is all well and good, but it’s tough to read (especially in a crowded, large lecture hall), time-consuming, and requires you to think on the spot, often leading to the realization that you’ve missed a key point after the presentation.

@6 – I don’t buy this line of argument any more than I accept the proposition that a hammer is responsible for poor architecture. A tool helps you perform a defined task more easily. It doesn’t substitute for thought and planning and it’s not supposed to. In the same vein, PowerPoint is design to help you convey your ideas more effectively, but you still need to think about it.

@27: Hilarious :-D

We should also note that the presenter is making the oh-so-fundamental error of addressing the screen instead of the audience.

Not much to add: I agree that powerpoint (and other multimedia packages) can be used effectively to balance spontaneity and random badgering of students — er, socratic techniques, on the one hand, with structure and intuitive presentation of data, on the other.

In my big introductory political science class, I use the Scott-Popkin debate on peasant rebellions as a good example of a constructive social-scientific debate, and I have to say, it’s really great to be able to integrate historical maps of Southeast Asia into a presentation that outlines the main points of dispute in that debate.

I thought Laura had a good discussion of this over at 11d a short while back. I’ll add something I posted there: depending on the room you have, I find that lectures combining logical and mathematical formalism with spontaneious elaborations and digressions can be done well with a combination of powerpoint and an old fashioned blackboard (or whiteboard), even for a big audience.

I do a segment in that intro class on decision and game theory, and for math-phobic arts students I find it’s really useful to have a powerpoint slide above the blackboard outlining the core concepts and key intuitions that I can then present formally on the blackboard below.

I also do a segment on Clifford Geertz and interpretation (“thick description” and “notes on the Balinese cockfight”) with no slides or visuals at all – strictly old school. But if I ever manage to find a (fundable) reason to get to Bali, you can bet I’ll post lots of beach and surf pics in the background for future versions of that lecture … another use for powerpoint.

I wrote a post about powerpoint power a month ago which included useful comments by loren and russell. I was pretty skeptical about its use, but I thought I would give it a shot. It has come in very handy in my media class. I can put up the picture of dead servicemen in caskets and talk about its impact. Much more effective than just talking about it. Now that we’re talking about blogs, I’ve been able to quickly move from Instapundit to Tapped. In my public policy class, I was able to show the latest poll information about the public’s growing interest in universal health care and even show the short video from the Times on their findings. That’s been super cool. I also have made text-only slides with definitions.

I’m dead set against using powerpoint for the theory class next fall.

The pros and cons: The students like it. And I need their good recommendations, so that’s important. It forces me to give more organized lectures. It does kill some spontaneity. I go through material faster, which can be a bad thing (more prep work). It takes more time to make the stupid slides and find the images.

I think the problem isn’t powerpoint but people buying into the whole bulletpoint / slideshow narrative structure bunk – devil’s in the details.

I agree with the PowerPoint is neater (and anyone who has suffered through my handwriting is grateful indeed to the software gods). And it is most excellent for data graphs and presentations, especially layering the graph in to follow the presentation. HOWEVER, most PP presentations I’ve been subjected to involve someone who spent so much time tweaking the slides, inserting so many visuals that the slides are unreadable beyond 10 feet, that the presenter never got around to well, practicing the speech. Now in academia, the balance may be different, but in the workaday world, powerpoint is a curse because the pretty pictures are the record, not the actual speech.

Well, I entirely agree with Jo’s column. I normally use overheads and have scribbled on blackboards in those few lecture theatres on campus that they can be found—and I’m greatly amused to learn that Bristol removed them on health and safety grounds…

In essence, I’ve found using PowerPoint to be akin to dropping nerve gas on students. The lights are dimmed, tired and weary students (many working jobs in addition to their studies) quickly consider just lying their head on a table for a few minutes, and the lecturer is off speaking to a large screen rather than the audience. When used well, it works great—and I do use it on occasion—but it is often used very poorly.

The worst I’ve seen was a presentation at a recent graduate conference a few years ago when I was finishing my Ph.D. The talk was on the benefits of computer-assisted learning: a true warning that the speaker knew nothing about it. We had a senior academic (employed at the university holding the event) walk up to the podium to load his PowerPoint presentation (after two graduate students gave a successful PowerPoint show moments before) only to then click “Start” and then “Shut Down” before our baffled eyes….as he told us how important it was to become computer literate and how his research demonstrated “the learning experience” (whatever this is) was improved, etc. and chiefly using PowerPoint.

Needless to say, the computer then turned off with a loud bang and he was overheard saying, “What just happened?” (A student nearby said quietly, “You’ve bloody turned the computer off.”) We had to wait for a technician to come in as this poor fellow didn’t know how to turn the computer back on. (Like with Jo, I have witnesses.) He then begins speaking for about ten minutes being told how wonderful his presentation is as the technician works away, entering and leaving and re-entering the room. Finally, the computer springs to life and the PowerPoint slides ready to go: all 64 or so of them (and for a talk that was to be no longer than 20 minutes). The rest of the show was a blur as this poor fellow thought it wise to show us all 64 slides he spent all night preparing. It was insane.

The truth is in the percentages. We’ve all been to bad lectures. The chance that a PowerPoint presentation will go bad is far greater than other forms of presentation. For this reason, I particularly dislike watching others’ PowerPoint shows. I do use it occasionally—surely I’ll do better, right?—but only occasionally.

It’s about presentation Zen. Less is more. Slides are visual cues. Handouts shouldn’t be copies of slides, they should contain the key points plus discussion. Presentations/talks should be something interesting themselves.

And more.

“And once you’ve given them a handout then they either know where you’re going or you’ll confuse the hell out of them if you go somewhere else. How does Powerpoint make things any worse in this respect?”

It doesn’t. But handouts aren’t owned by Microsoft, and Power Point is. And its more hip to hate Microsoft than to hate paper mills. Thus Power Point is worse.

Sk