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Writing bullet points or titles on slides is just silly. It's faster to just write it on a blackboard, or whiteboard, or just a big piece of paper. PP is useful for graphs and charts, overlaying the graphs, animating the graphs to show changes and relationships for information that needs to be presented in some type of graph form. Writing a title or a few words over a picture from the internet is not much of a teaching tool. Smartboards, on the other hand, are much more useful, where the teacher can write and organize information spontaneously, creating a graph or web in present time, based on student response during the class. Making a PP slide is a time consuming task, with little communication benefit,other than to visually entertain those who just cannot pay attention, unless there are colors and designs.
Smart boards are completely outdated and anything that can be done on a smart board can be done better with just a projector and software like doceri.
As for PowerPoint style lecturing dismissing it completely is as bad an idea as embracing it completely. It's a tool nothing more.
As for those with their bullet point phobia. Again nothing inherently wrong with bullet points. For example a lecture on natural selection should have the three postulates (and no they don't need to be complete sentences) bulleted and then the lecturer explains them.
For all of you who hate this style of lecture and prefer someone,like the author in the article, who just talks many, many people not only hate that type of lecture but don't have a learning style that corresponds well to it. I learn best by reading not by listening, a well designed PowerPoint anchors a lecture. Same goes for visual learners. Audio learners are not the only ones out there and given that lectures are already auditory a PowerPoint for the rest of us is just downright fair in many situations.
It's been established in other venues besides education that PowerPoint leads to bad decisions. One of the major flaws of PowerPoint is it encourages a style of communication that lacks depth and detail. It encourages participants to believe that communication has occurred when it in fact has not. There are some studies that show it as a contributing factor to the Columbia accident.
Very few people know how to use it well and many use it badly. For example, the widely used bullet point. It means nothing because it's an incomplete thought. You have to have the speaker's words to make the thought. Essentially it is nothing more than an outline for the speaker and is worthless to the audience. Yet many read the PPT bullet and believe they have learned something.
Data, information, animation on the screen that extends or illustrates the concept helps, but only if applicable to the point and well done.
Would appreciate sources for this.
I thought a piece of foam from the bipod ramp was at fault for the Columbia accident, not PowerPoint?
Teaching is one thing. Presenting is another. Powerpoint is great for presentations. Especially in a business setting.
When I teach, I start out each class with 5 slides:
1. What we covered last class.
2. What you read in the text.
3. What we're going to discuss today.
4. What you're going to read in the text for next class.
5. What we are covering next class.
I spend about a minute on each slide and then we go into lecture, demonstrations and discussion.
Anything that can be done in PowerPoint can be done better in a .pdf file, and the .pdf file is good for reading later. That last part is the key. PowerPoint is pretty much only good to supplement a lecture. At the college level and beyond, people need more details than can be fit into those slides.
What's more, a .pdf file can be printed out by students, who can write notes in the margins. This is often even better than writing notes on blank paper. Good .pdf files can make for good reading years later, and they're a lot cheaper than textbooks (and they're easier to make, so they can contain more current material or material customized by the professor herself).
I still have printed copies of the .pdf notes of several of my grad school professors. (Those notes basically amounted to nice books on their subjects.) PowerPoint stuff? No one used that in grad school, but I sometimes encounter it when I'm searching for new material to read. It's always worthless, as it never contains anywhere close to enough information.
That's probably what disappoints me most about the push to put course materials from certain schools online. Sounds great, right? Well, not when it turns out that most of what is posted consists of PowerPoint presentations and occasional videos. Blech. I'm a professional, not a kid. I can handle adult-level material, which means actual books with equations and everything.
ppt can contain more content types than pdf, can be converted to pdf to be printed, and can be annotated by the professor or the student. not sure what your problem is other than perhaps being too lazy to do the above.
PowerPoint's are great if and as the research work is done to put it together. The anti PowerPoint people may well have not viewed a well prepared presentation.
I use it, and the results are great. One needs to know their subject material then they can use it as the support tool which it is.
Some people are simply "slide clickers", who don't expound on their subject material or know how to use the range of attributes within the program.
sharing information is sharing information, one has to understand the benefits of PowerPoint, as the TOOL which it is, and there should be very little problem or kick back in utilizing the program.
But, its like social media in some ways, people are so filled with "Short Attention Span Mentality", they are not going to get any benefit from anything, and especially if it consist of more than 120 character. Some people can't digest compound thoughts, nor to connect parallel content, no matter how its presented.
Society now is made into a level of comprehension sickness due to the incessant training which promotes "short attention spans".
Even in blog post, if its over three lines of text, their minds can't handle it and they get that overwhelmed feeling and they resist indulging.
Short Attention Spans, leads to many snap judgments and incomplete thought processes.The tech world loves it, because they can simply limit the capabilities of software tech, and within six months add a few feature and sell it as a major innovation and people rush out to buy it, never knowing the previous version likely had the capability, except the developer locked it out, because it knows peoples short attention span, is a money maker in the context of rolling out a more functional version.
TV commercials are good at training people to adopt a short attention span.
Sadly, today many are less astute than they know, they engage "short attention scans of subject material" looking for dynamic's and miss the content which clarifies what is and how is something conveying the intricate data to support the attracting dynamics.
Ehh....Smart Phones and social media is making us stupid.
People's attention spans are shorter than ever.
Very hard to the average person's attention for more than 5 or 10 minutes at a time.
Let's not even get into keep a childs attention in the classroom.
PPT is not the problem.
I'd rep you 100 times for this but I can only rep this once. It's Google that's making us dumb. Kids don't think they google answers and they actually think the person who FINDS it first is the smartest.
I agree on attention spans too. I read somewhere that the average person stays on a web page something like 5 seconds when researching a topic before moving on and rarely comes back to the page. The internet is presenting information in bits and bytes and that's what our brains now expect. I cringe when people tout technology as the savior of education because I see it dummying down our kids. They don't remember things because they can look them up but you can't THINK about things that aren't IN YOUR HEAD.
I thought a piece of foam from the bipod ramp was at fault for the Columbia accident, not PowerPoint?
Accident investigations look at not only the direct causes, but the contributing causes. In many cases the contributing causes are more important because they are simultaneously more subtle and more impacting. That's because they set the stage for more accidents.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Report, page 191, describes the communication problems caused by PowerPoint. I believe the Return to Flight team also had something to say about PowerPoint, but I don't have that in front of me.
I've spent my career in this field and have often seen PowerPoint lead to bad decisions. It creates the illusion of communication when in fact none has occurred. It is often used and proliferated well beyond the initial briefing, but without the words of the speaker. So those phrases that were nice memory joggers during the presentation become meaningless a day later -- the detailed explanatory material is no longer there. Also, PowerPoint is not interactive between the presenter and audience; it is passive. While yes, a well done PowerPoint can supplement a well crafted report, it cannot take the place of it.
09-27-2015, 10:09 AM
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n/a posts
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chance and Change
Some people are simply "slide clickers", who don't expound on their subject material or know how to use the range of attributes within the program.
sharing information is sharing information, one has to understand the benefits of PowerPoint, as the TOOL which it is, and there should be very little problem or kick back in utilizing the program.
Sure. The problem is that "some people" seems to be functionally equal to "everyone."
In college, Powerpoint lectures fell into two categories: walls of text that took forever to work through and slides that didn't actually say anything.
At conferences, virtually all presentations are either so shallow as to be completely worthless or so overloaded with information that no one can understand it before the speaker moves on to the next overloaded, incomprehensible slide.
Perhaps the worst abuse though is purposely using it to hide and obscure the facts. Sometimes people make slides with no information precisely because they don't want to tell the whole story. Sadly, in many environments a quick decision based on shallow analysis of the data will get one a lot further than taking the time to actually understand what's happening.
It can be a good tool, but only in the hands of someone who actually appreciates it for what it is.
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I'd rep you 100 times for this but I can only rep this once. It's Google that's making us dumb. Kids don't think they google answers and they actually think the person who FINDS it first is the smartest. 
