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.

… and an enemy of PowerPoint, is featured, along with other anti-PPers, in a Wall Street Journal piece.

Excerpts:

… José Bowen, a SourPointer who serves as dean of Southern Methodist University’s School of the Arts… is a jazz musician who has played with Dizzy Gillespie and written for Jerry Garcia. So he knows performance. And he insists that PowerPoint undermines it, serving as a crutch for professors and lulling students into boredom and passivity. He encourages his SMU colleagues not to use the program in lectures—to “teach naked,” as he says.

T.X. Hammes brings a quite different background to the ranks of the SourPointers. A retired colonel in the Marine Corps and an expert on counterinsurgency warfare, Col. Hammes wrote in this month’s Armed Forces Journal that PowerPoint “is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making.”

In the Defense Department and military, he writes, the agenda is driven by vague, oversimplified and easily misunderstood bullet points. While decision-makers once read and slept on “succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues,” today they are harried by PowerPoint’s pace and “are making more decisions with less preparation and less time for thought,” Col. Hammes charges.

As Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, Mr. Bowen, Col. Hammes and other SourPointers are propped on the shoulders of Edward Tufte. A design guru and former Yale University professor, Mr. Tufte travels the country giving six-hour lectures that people in advertising, programming and publishing pay hundreds of dollars to attend. Upending PowerPoint is a chief goal of his work.

Mr. Tufte’s case against PowerPoint is lengthy, detailed and not subtle. The program is evil and wasteful, he wrote in 2003—a “prankish conspiracy against evidence and thought.” On the cover of his self-published pamphlet, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” Mr. Tufte depicts Josef Stalin overlooking a large, rigid Soviet military parade and declaring “Next slide, please.”…

Tufte sent UD the Stalin poster, which you can see on the wall next to her office door.

… as the Cowardly Lion sings…

If I were king, enlightened deans would see that most instances of PowerPoint use in the classroom are lazy and irresponsible and even inhuman. They would understand that PowerPoint breeds a robotic remoteness and simple-mindedness in professors that in turn breeds boredom in students. These deans would firmly discourage their teaching staff from using PowerPoint.

Dream on, you fool!

… And yet…

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked” — by which he means, sans machines.

More than anything else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections of slides.

He’s not the only one raising questions about PowerPoint, which on many campuses is the state of the art in classroom teaching. A study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw. The survey consisted of 211 students at a university in England and was conducted by researchers at the University of Central Lancashire.

Students in the survey gave low marks not just to PowerPoint, but also to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities, even interactive exercises in computer labs. “The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions,” said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

But…

The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors…

Yes well. You know how irritable you become when you’ve been sleeping and people try to wake you up.

“[S]tudents … are used to being spoon-fed material that is going to be quote unquote on the test,” says [one observer]. “Students have been socialized to view the educational process as essentially passive.”

Duh! The professor’s been socialized to be passive too, sitting there like a pointless nothing watching a movie or staring at slides along with the kiddies. What a rip-off. You’re paying a lot in tuition for your professor to warm her ass on the seat next to you. To read bullet points aloud to you like a kindergarten teacher.

UD certainly sees the benefit of PowerPoint to professor and student. Nobody has to do anything, and the only negative is that everyone’s bored out of their gourd.

But, as this enlightened dean notes, college professors are supposed to do something. So are college students.

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UD thanks Bill for the link.

And your students know it.

Excerpts from “Your Professor’s PowerPoint Presentation,” in  College Humor.

The same slide show I’ve been

using for five years.

My entire job is to click a

button a few times and read

slides written by my TA.

Copied these points directly from the book.

You won’t believe how much they pay me to provide this effort-free method of teaching….

UD thanks Jason, a reader, for sending her this.

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UPDATE: Anger at lazy professors overusing PowerPoint has become part of campus life. Opening sentences from an editorial at the Stevens Institute of Technology:

As students, we can sometimes feel discouraged that our concerns are not being addressed. Whether we want to see better food in Pierce, more parking spaces on campus, or fewer PowerPoint presentations in class, it is easy to feel that we have no recourse in these matters…

… students constantly write sad pieces in the campus newspaper advising them, in the simplest terms, how to use it.

But, as this University of Kansas student knows, instruction in the technology don’t mean shit if you’re using it because you’re lazy, unimaginative, or incompetent.

… Some people seem to make slides only because they think they have to. Others rely on PowerPoint to cover up their weaknesses, such as when they become nervous and simply read out texts on slides.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather not have a PowerPoint unless it’s well-made. One of my favorite instructors, for example, never used PowerPoint in his class. He always made his point clear and I never felt bored in class. His animated expression and gestures showed his passion for his subject, which drew me to the class.

And as a University of Alabama student notes:

You pay thousands of dollars to attend our fine University, not to mention the hundreds of dollars you are forced to spend on books. You head to class with your coffee and your copy of The Crimson White and take a seat. Your professor puts up his or her PowerPoint and starts to read it word for word. Literally. And it is literally word for word from your book.

At another university, a student says the same thing:

I took an art history class at Truman in which we spent endless hours flipping through PowerPoint slides of paintings while the professor read, one by one, the title of each work. We received mountains of information, but toward the end of the semester, one student sitting next to me actually pleaded under her breath, “Teach us something!”

Imagine what might happen if students all over the country began to organize. A Princeton student sees the possibilities:

The incomparable level of boredom Powerpoint inspires has …unite[d] a generation of young students trapped in lecture[s]…

PowerPoint. A deadly technology for dead people.

Eventually students will rise up against you.

Their signs will read TEACH US SOMETHING.