My recent attack on most forms of PowerPoint use in the classroom – All Important Trends Start in California – produced many thoughtful comments, and I’m grateful for them. Let me, by way of beginning to respond, excerpt a recent piece in the Guardian that echoes and extends some of my remarks.
Let me also say that my focus is not on occasional courses in which clever and restrained use of this and other visual technologies makes a better class. My focus is on student (and other audience) response to PowerPoint in general, and on the clear trend toward the overuse of this technology and other technologies in settings in which direct human interaction should be primary.
Here’s some of the Guardian essay. Its author isn’t a professor; he specializes in corporate communications.
…Does anyone else hate PowerPoint? At conferences and meetings, I inwardly groan as speakers load up their ponderous projections. I don’t mind maps and pictures, but all those words of text drive me crazy. “And now for my introduction …” and up comes the word “introduction”. ‘”There are four main points” and we see “four points”.
Masses of facts and statistics follow. These should all have been given out as an information sheet, or put on a website. Instead, while you are trying to read through the material, the lecturer is wandering verbally all over it. There’s a confusion of focus, and it gives me a headache.
When I worked in television, I was told: “Don’t Lord Privy Seal.” The point was that if you had to talk on a programme about a parliamentary person called the Lord Privy Seal, don’t illustrate it with pictures of a Lord, a toilet and a seal clapping its flippers.
Over-illustration is disturbing for audiences. Now, with PowerPoint, we have Lord Privy Sealing on extreme setting. As the slides flash by, the most important relationship in public speaking is being undermined – the link between the speaker and the audience.
Good speakers watch their audiences, they don’t allow them to be distracted. If heads are nodding or feet shuffling, it is time to grab their attention. Change the tone of your voice, slow down, then suddenly accelerate. “And crucially!”, you shout, then say the next thing very softly, so people crane forward in case they miss vital information. [Readers who read UD's dispatches from the NCAA convention in Inside Higher Education may recall her many death-by-PowerPoint narratives. Her main point in all of them was the one this writer's making: PowerPoint tends to be particularly lethal because the speaker's busy giving head, if you will, to the computer, and often has no idea that her audience is asleep. UD means this literally; she looked around those big conference rooms at the convention and saw row after row of sleeping people.]
You can tell jokes, especially at the beginning. There is nothing more annoying for an audience member than to have missed a joke that made everyone else laugh. A good gag at the start can ensure rapt attention all the way through.
Those frightened of public speaking would be better off taking a couple of acting classes than hiding behind new technology. Keep it minimal and stop clicking away frantically on a mouse. Can you imagine Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, with a large 2 coming up behind him and a picture of a honey pot?
Classroom teaching has also succumbed to the dominance of the projector. Students routinely request “the overheads”. This reduces lectures to the status of a correspondence course, leaving no great reason to attend at all. [This begins to respond to one commenter on UD's PowerPoint thread who talked about students demanding PowerPoint. Students may have bad reasons for wanting PowerPoint, in which case professors should ignore the request.]
Lectures should be a way of engaging students and showing them why a subject is exciting. We can enthuse and motivate with the drama of what we have to say (why else call it a lecture theatre?). The ability to communicate face to face and hold the attention of others is a vital human skill. Beware of a technology in which the speed of our fingers is more important than the quality of our voices.
February 17th, 2008 at 6:27PM
It seems to me that the disagreements in the last powerpoint thread were mostly challenging UD to be a bit less sweeping in her denunciations of powerpoint, but I certainly accept that the problem that UD is writing about is both common and scandalous.
I’m fairly new to teaching in higher education and, like Dance in the previous thread, I have found that a significant number of students want powerpoints in the lectures and want them to be distributed electronically. Based on a limited amount of experience, these students also seem to be the ones least able to believe that powerpoints are just lecture aids, rather than being the real content of the lecture to which the professor’s remarks are the equivalent of a gloss in the margin of a medieval manuscript.
In my first year of teaching I acquiesced and used powerpoint but in my second year (this one) I have reconsidered. Now I don’t use them at all for classes with less than 30 students. For larger classes I still use them in a fairly minimal way (maybe 5 or 6 slides per lecture, mostly quotations from texts that are being discussed, along with the occasional diagram). I have also started circulating mock examinations early on in the semester so that students can see that they are not going to be tested on their ability to memorize the contents of the slides.
As to why the students might demand powerpoint, I have two speculative explanations (which I don’t take be to rivals, they might both play a role). 1) The students’ experience in previous classes have made them expect that they will be assessed on their ability to memorize bullet points and other powerpoint friendly information. 2) I think that some students actually prefer this kind of assessment to being tested on their ability to really comprehend and critically evaluate complex ideas and texts. That may sound implausible, since the former is obviously more boring, but I think it strikes many of them as more fair. In the humanities especially I think students often feel that their achievement should correlate quite precisely with the effort they put into the course (in the hard sciences they are more likely to, however grudgingly, accept that there are objective standards of excellence) – that is, humanities subjects are the one domain in which Marx’s Labor Theory of Value is widely accepted by students. Given that assumption, students – especially the weaker students – will prefer exercises in memorization to assignments or examinations that require them to think critically, exercise interpretative judgment, etc.
One topic that came up near the end of the previous thread was that subject area might make a difference; some subjects (e.g. geology) might deal with information that is more suited to being conveyed using powerpoint slides way than others (e.g. English literature). That seems almost certainly right to me, which of course isn’t to say that it would be impossible to find a teacher of English who uses powerpoints in a genuinely effective way.
UD and others interested in this topic might appreciate the following, which I came across a few years ago: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
February 17th, 2008 at 6:54PM
Hmm…
I usually believe that one shot per post is the polite way to do business, but the topic continues to reappear more frequently than the energizer bunny.
To summarize: Four legs good, two legs bad, powerpoint evil.
I think, as others have posted, that discipline has something to do with this as does the teacher. Powerpoint won’t make a good teacher bad nor a bad one good. A further rant along these lines is on the Periodic Table.
We all have our windmills, UD. This one is yours I guess.
Best regards,
Mr. Bonzo
Who last night saw Third, Wendy Wasserstein’s last play. About a very stubborn female English professor…
February 17th, 2008 at 11:29PM
one commenter on UD’s PowerPoint thread who talked about students demanding PowerPoint
Er, I talked about students demanding information-dumping, in various forms including PPT. This relates to a larger issue, which is that many students want to be told what the right answer is, and are very uncomfortable with essay exams that may have several right answers. I still think that focusing on PPT overlooks this more fundamental problem.
Peter W, I might have to borrow your trick of circulating mock exams throughout the semester.
February 18th, 2008 at 1:12AM
Well, this is the first year I’m doing it, so I can’t vouch for its effectiveness, but my hope is that it will help the students to understand what will and what won’t be required of them. That way they know that it’s not *meant* to be an information-dump class rather than worrying that it *is* an info-dump class in which the professor is failing to live up to his or her part of the dumping bargain.
February 18th, 2008 at 8:28AM
[...] semester and they proved very popular. An article from the Guardian Margaret Soltan linked to over there explains [...]