The Powerpoint Mess
I don’t have time as I need to prepare my own slides for a lecture but here’s an open invitation to comment on this mess. I may use this the next time one of my policy students complains that political scientists oversimplify things. We know that the world is a complex place, which is precisely why it is so uninformative to create an image that essentially just communicates that (and only that). The accompanying NYT article is actually more about the evils of bullet points. Nobody defends Powerpoint and nobody thinks it is going anywhere. I wonder whether people are being nostalgic for something that never existed: the idea that the average meeting/presentation was once both interesting and informative.
ps. Lee had a characteristically great post on powerpoint a while back with lots of good links and comments.
Comments
This is an awesome suggestion for anyone who needs to teach a theoretically grounded course to policy students - I will be stealing it.
Posted by: Henry | April 27, 2010 10:37 AM
Henry: go ahead and steal. Btw, i am grooving on the image of “our monkey” right above that slide. I think the monkey may have to enter the presentation too.
Posted by: Erik | April 27, 2010 10:57 AM
I have tried to teach using both concept maps and presentation software, and have found that the two were working at cross-purposes. The problem with the chart above is the opposite of the problem with the standard slide format. The problem with the chart is the lack of simplification. The problem with the standard bullet format is that it is too simple. Although there can be multiple levels of indentation, they get hard to see on an overhead, so many bullet-based presentations simply amount to a two-level list.
The effect on students is to encourage the idea that the course content consists in a set of bits of information that they need to remember, i.e. remember 80% of the bits of info (bullets) and you’ll get 80% on the course. Somewhere in between the impossibly complex concept map and the two-level list is where one generally wants to be.
Posted by: Andrew Lister | April 27, 2010 12:20 PM
I agree with several of the comments under Lee’s piece.
I give a lecture to our honors students every year about how not to annoy an audience with PowerPoint. The essence of it is that slides should only be used to communicate value-added visuals — that is, something that is more effectively communicated visually than verbally.
The flip side of that, though, is that knee-jerk PowerPoint bashers annoy me as well. The fact that YOU, your colleagues, mentors, etc., don’t know how to use it properly doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. It’s simply replaced the chalkboard and transparencies as the medium of choice for poor lecturers to bore and irritate us. Erik’s point about nostalgia for something that never existed is dead on.
Posted by: Adam | April 27, 2010 12:34 PM
It’s simply replaced the chalkboard and transparencies as the medium of choice for poor lecturers to bore and irritate us.
Worth reiterating, because it’s the crux of the whole thing. If you can’t orate your lecture without relying on powerpoint, you probably shouldn’t be giving it in the first place.
Posted by: Karaka | April 27, 2010 01:38 PM