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Freakonomics Does PowerPoint.

Freakonomics finds the correct headline:

A DIFFERENT KIND OF TEACHER CHEATING

Freakonomics also finds the correct words:

Ubiquitous in classrooms, PowerPoint makes lecturing easy, boring, and forgettable … That’s exactly why lazy students like it: if their teacher isn’t truly engaging with the material, they don’t have to either…

Many commenters on the post – students, professors, businesspeople – also find the correct words. A sample:

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I’ve been out of college for a couple years, but I began seeing PP as a cop-out for true lecturing and presentation skills back in high school (when everyone was jumping on and just loving it)…

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The powerpoint problem has been realized in the DOD for years, and is the butt of jokes at all ranks. It is actively despised by the poor souls who try to condense complex 30 page reports into 3-4 bullets, and those forced to sit through them.

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I speak professionally on a regular occasion and I loathe PowerPoint; however, it’s just taken as commonplace at meetings. Instead of paying attention to your presentation the attendees are busy on the Blackberries while then relying on you to give them copies of the presentation.

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So nice to hear I am not alone in loathing the standard Power Point presentation, wherein we must see the slides, have them read to us, and then take them home. Why not just email the lecture to us to read in our pajamas?

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…PowerPoint and similar software programs have a single purpose. They fill that need very, very well. If what you need is something that aligns with that need, then you should definitely use them.

That purpose is persuasion.

They are, fundamentally, sales tools. They very effectively show (just) your side of the story, in a slick, shiny, carefully constructed, but artificial, environment that makes whatever you say appear to be neater and more logically progressive than it really is.

“Persuasion” is not “informing people”. It is not “educating people.” It is the opposite of “getting people to think about options, alternatives, and flaws in your line of argument.”

If your actual need is different, then you should NOT use them. Sure: with sufficient effort, you can use the software to do something else — say, by turning off all the PowerPoint-y features and using it as a means of displaying text that you would otherwise write on a chalkboard. Or displaying your name and contact information in the background while you just talk. I hear you can import movies into software and use it instead of a regular DVD player, too.

But if you’re not selling anything, you should instead choose tools that are better suited to your actual need, like “paragraphs on paper” or “hands-on demonstration” or whatever best communicates your ideas and information….

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I teach at the university level. Many professors use Power Point. I never have. Why?

The best way to engage a class — whether there are 10 or 300 students is to talk as though you’re talking to one person. Improvise each lecture to some degree, even if you’ve covered the material many times before; give example of subject matter as they occur to you…

Power Point is more like reading a lecture: b o r i n g ! Engage your audience by having a conversation with “one” person — even if there are hundreds in the venue.

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Just graduated from college and I hated almost every class that used powerpoint. Made every class boring and hard to pay attention.

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Don’t use it for math. I had a math class that did this and learned 0.

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I have presented using PP and I find it is better to plan a dynamic presentation, engage your audience, and then hand out the notes at the end. You are guaranteed more interaction and questions if you give them the notes on the presentation at the end.

Why not engage more, encourage people to pay attention and ask educated questions. Include them in the learning process!

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[PP] presenters essentially treat the audience as illiterates and read the content of their slides OR they do not read the slides, expecting the audience to read them while they talk about something else. Too often, presenters (me included) prepare slides with so much content that neither they nor their audience can possibly read them because it is very difficult to dumb down complex points to Twitter format.

AND it is far too easy to essentially lecture to one’s slides and not to the audience, thereby missing critically important data about listeners’ reactions. I also agree with others who point out that when listeners know that they will receive copies of the slides, they feel free to use the time to prepare shopping lists, think through their schedules, and other tasks that are far removed from the topics at hand. What should be a tool that facilitates learning seems more often than not to impede it in my experience.

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Powerpoint is truly where education goes to die. Such lazy, lazy professors. All they do now is stand there and read off their powerpoint slides, which they probably just recycle semester after semester. What is even the point in going to class? You can just download the powerpoint slides, which some professors make available now, perhaps in a tacit admission of, “yeah, I’m useless and I know it.” Lots of professors hate undergrads and really only care about getting on with their research, and this is an expression of it.

If you are a professor and you rely on your powerpoint slides, you FAIL. They should be used SPARINGLY and OCCASIONALLY, and really should only be necessary for presenting multimedia things that you’d have no way of introducing otherwise. Maybe in a few places they could be used to outline some basic diagrams or bulletpoints. You should NOT be just standing there and reading off your slides.

And is it just me or were those slides a one-way ticket to slumberland? Something about the lights off, monotonous slides, and lazy professor just put me right to sleep.

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The last one’s my favorite.

Margaret Soltan, August 4, 2009 7:26PM
Posted in: powerpoint pissoff

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11 Responses to “Freakonomics Does PowerPoint.”

  1. Bill Gleason Says:

    Sorry to break it to you folks,…

    Last Friday I spent approximately three hours listening to 12 students give 12 powerpoint presentations on their summer’s work as interns at the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute. The talks lasted about ten minutes and were uniformly excellent. No one read from their slides, and there was animated discussion after each talk.

    It would not have been possible to present this material in ten minutes – some presentations included short movies – without powerpoint.

    Yes, it can be misused. And no, I would not teach an English class using powerpoint. But puhleeze… Could we stop beating this defenseless horse?

    If this were such an unequivocally black and white issue, powerpoint would have been gone long ago.

    Bill

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    The issue’s very much alive, Bill, and I’m eager to be involved in it.

  3. Cassandra Says:

    N=12 is such compelling evidence, Bill.

    Ever think that maybe someone had somehow taught those 12 students how to use PowerPoint properly?

    The fact remains that, just as Freakonomics connected the love of PowerPoint with lazy students, the same has been observed by many of us who refuse to use PowerPoint in class. I have had many students complain bitterly that I didn’t use PowerPoint, and nearly every one of them was a student who had no idea what was going on the entire semester.

    It’s hard to pay attention when you’re 1/ absent or 2/ IMing when you actually come to class, ya know? With PowerPoint, a prof can just make the slides public and instill false faith among the students that, should they study the slides, they will magically become competent!

    Not using PowerPoint does not automatically make one a bad teacher, just as using PowerPoint doesn’t automatically make one a good teacher. But, see, it’s really hard to evaluate teaching with end-of-semester customer satisfaction surveys disguised as teaching evaluations, and few institutions have the desire to evaluate teaching by more valid and reliable methods. It’s easier for everyone to just pretend technology is a panacea for the breakdown of the educational system.

  4. Bill Gleason Says:

    My, my, Cassandra, you are so good with the straw man arguments.

    And, yes, I do think that someone had taught those students how to use Power Point, properly – that would be me.

    And please note my original message that stated that there are some courses where I would not use Power Point. By the same token I think that you should be willing to admit that not all teachers who use power point are terrible teachers.

    And by the way the bulk of the teaching that I have done over about forty years has not been done with Power Point. I never claimed that technology was a panacea for the breakdown of the educational system.

    I hope that your name is not life imitating art?

    Best,

    Bill

  5. Dom Says:

    The unstated assumption that PowerPoint forces on its users is that every single segment of their presentation requires a visual aid.

    There are six things you can put on a PowerPoint slide:

    1. A diagram. If a textbook would have one, so can your lecture.

    2. Computer code or equations.

    3. A list of bullet points, just like this one.

    4. A single salient point you want the audience to keep in mind. This is great for a persuasive investor presentation or keynote speech: while you explain that you sold 1.5 million widgets in 2008 and another half million through June 2009, a huge, glowing “2 Million” behind the presenter distracts from the drop in sales. A single chart works this way too, if it goes up.

    5. An unreadable blob of data: book excerpts, financial spreadsheet extracts, multiple charts.

    6. Some decoration: book covers, Gandhi quotes, kittens.

    If your discipline provides diagrams or equations for your topic, PowerPoint works very well. If you are giving a talk intended to persuade, you can imitate Steve Jobs with a single salient point per slide, and drop any part of your talk that lacks such a salient, persuasive point; this improves your keynote. If you are walking your audience through detailed, printed financial data, you can have it behind you as blobs of tiny print.

    Lists sometimes work—I’m using one to make this argument—but they arise quite rarely, certainly nowhere near as often as most PowerPoint presenters make a slide transition. Nevertheless, most topics don’t lend themselves at all to any of the other slide formats, and so presenters end up compressing whatever point they wanted to make into a list of bullet points.

    This results a lecture running in parallel with a boring, stupid parody of itself in the visual channel:

    POWERPOINT STUPID

    • Argument incompatible with visual aid

    • Blank screen unacceptable, kitten distracting

    • Hence, boring dumb bulleted slide you skipped to

    • You did skip to the slide, admit it

  6. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Book covers, Gandhi quotes, kittens — LOL.

    A comment full of substance, too, Dom. Thank you.

  7. Bill Gleason Says:

    Good points, all, Dom. I especially liked: "If your discipline provides diagrams or equations for your topic, PowerPoint works very well."

    Best,

    Bill

  8. theprofessor Says:

    Bill G.–out of 24 seminar project reports by students last semester that used PP, I graded 5 as excellent, 11 as good, 5 as satisfactory, and 3 as poor. Of 8 seminar reports that did not use PP, I graded 1 as good, 2 as satisfactory, and 5 as poor. The very weakest seminar reports I see these days are inevitably the ones who don’t use PP. Admittedly, I teach in areas that lend themselves to use of considerable numbers of images.

    The profs who do bad PP should go into administration, where they obviously belong. They will have many colleagues there who share their disabilities.

  9. david foster Says:

    Back before P/P was in common use, people still did presentations requiring visuals…but often has either *secretaries* or *real graphics artists* to help them with the design. Perhaps sketching something out on a piece of paper and giving it to a secretary to turn into slides, instead of wrestling with the P/P details himself, lets the presenter focus more on content and ideas and less on the mechanics. (Of course, some people still work this way, sketching out the general layout and letting a secretary or executive assistant do the detailed work, but this category of administrative support people has become far less common than they once were)

    And there are sometimes useful images that a graphics artist can do that the typical P/P monkey lacks the skills to pull off, at least without spending hours and hours trying to get it to look right.

    A software executive once commented that "what we’ve really done with the computer revolution is to turn high-paid executives into incompetent clerk-typists." To which we can now add, incompetent or marginally-competent graphics artists, as well.

  10. Bill Gleason Says:

    As an unskilled powerpoint monkey, I’d like to point out that I have neither the time, the money, or the secretary to help me with visuals.

    And by the way, there are puhlenty of public domain packages for preparing good graphics of the type I need: chemical structures, X-Y plots of data, etc. Even in the old days I could do a pretty good job with a Xerox machine and some scissors.

    Today – insert is not that hard. Even undergrads can do it, some of them very well.

    Bill

  11. Shane Says:

    Cassandra: Since N~20 is the tipping point going from a sample to a population in statistics, Bill’s twelve students is a reasonable piece of evidence. The assumption is that one is accounting only for random error. In teaching students how to present their work (i.e., use Powerpoint, for example) he is removing the bias of systematic error.

    "…many of us who refuse to use PowerPoint in class" is an amazing piece of self-righteous pomposity. You don’t use it because it does not suit the material you wish to present. To inflate that utilitarian argument into some sort of principled stand is liberopomorphic grandiosity. (http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=15204#comments)

    There is likely to be observer error in your analysis of lazy students.

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