… 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.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:34AM
From that article, in case you didn’t click through dear readers of this blog:
“Any general opposition to PowerPoint is just dumb,” argued Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in an email. “It’s like denouncing lectures—before there were awful PowerPoint presentations, there were awful scripted lectures, unscripted lectures, slide shows, chalk talks, and so on.”
Computer programming pioneer Larry Wall has argued similarly, stating: “I do quarrel with logic that says ‘Stupid people are associated with X, therefore X is stupid.’ Stupid people are associated with everything.”
Amen. I think that last line will be my new mantra.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:56AM
Yes, yes, Shane.
August 3rd, 2009 at 11:26AM
Mr. Wall may be mostly right, but there certainly are things that seem to attract more stupidity than others. We may justifiably think of those things as greater stupidity aggregators, if not actually stupid themselves.
Dr. Pinker, I believe, overlooks PowerPoint’s role in aiding and abetting the awfulness of lectures. As a highlighting device, showing for example a picture of a possibly unfamiliar object referred to in a talk, it is useful and beneficial. But as a lazy shortcut, which it is in the hands of nearly everyone who uses it, PowerPoint fades good talks into average, average into mediocre and mediocre into abysmal.
Poor speakers and presenters have at their disposal any number of tools to enable them to bore their listeners. I see no reason to encourage their use of yet another.
August 3rd, 2009 at 12:34PM
Brett, I love the idea of stupidity aggregators–that’s an idea so elegant it just has to be true! Do consider it stolen.
We’ve debated this PPT problem before here on ye ol’ UD blog, and I still don’t get it. There must be something up the backside of the libero- types that it bugs them so. It can’t be that it’s just enabling presenters "to bore their listeners", for if that was the case, all teaching should still be done as pedagogy–literally walking about. No, we came inside for a reason, maybe more than one.
August 3rd, 2009 at 6:02PM
POWERPOINT NOT STUPID
• Other methods also stupid
• Not all PowerPoints stupid
• Liberals! …Arts!
(A laser pointer dot wiggles around the ellipsis.)
August 3rd, 2009 at 6:09PM
Well said, Dom.
August 4th, 2009 at 6:49AM
I’ve been banned by UD! Wonder if I can put that in my faculty activity report.