Before computerised tools like Powerpoint, presention aids such as hand-drawn flipcharts and slides were even more bullet-dominated and sequential.

Whether the presenter controls what points are “key” is a matter of power relationships, not of presentation technology. If you’re presenting to a company’s senior management and they think you’ve got it wrong or strongly dislike the implications of what you’re saying, you lose control PDQ.

Powerpoint has at least made it a lot easier to copy graphs and pictures from other computerised tools. So when used well, Powerpoint enables more people to produce more informative and attractive presentations. It’s not Powerpoint’s fault that some people use it badly and get carried away with “cool” effects.

Dreamweaver is a web page editor, and it’s just as possible to produce bullet lists in web pages. And Dreamweaver makes it just as easy to get carried away with “cool” effects – look at the vast numbers of tacky web pages.

The web page style of presentation does have 1 advantage – you can include a main menu that makes it easier to move flexibly around the content. But if Microsoft were to include a menu feature in Powerpoint, then Powerpoint would be clearly superior because it’s far easier to use – it requires no knowledge of HTML and CSS and can import data from e.g. spreadsheets.

As many of the comments here have noted, the linear non-interactive style of Lecture presentations is not necessarily the best way to teach and learn. And if you want to challenge that mode then Powerpoint is not your tool. Like the famous names I have named, I think it is unlikely that many of us use Powerpoint and Lecturing as our sole teachng mode – my first year students attend small group tutorials, watch videos, participate in online discussions (their participation in these is graded), and other activities. My graduate classes involve all manner of interactive learning, and this year one of their assignments is to contruct a collaborative wiki. As others have pointed out there are new avenues for different kinds of teaching now, and people will start to use them as teaching culture changes. We are slowly moving away from didactic lecturing. But I fully expect to see really really bad teaching games, and ugly interactive, non linear lectures, and unfathomable collaborative efforts in the near future. Blaming your tools is not particularly productive, but I suppose it is a start to thinking about better teaching practice.

My school has the projectors and I’m an enthusiastic user e.g. http://faculty.uwb.edu/danby/bls324/324spring06.html
The visual power of the projector, and the ability of web pages to make a lot of stuff available to students in an orderly way, are wonderful things. The objection to powerpoint, and I think this is Tufte’s point too, is that it is about the dumbest way possible to use this lovely new technology.

Outlining tools can be helpful in planning a presentation, but they should not be the presentation itself. Also, there are much better outlining tools out there than PP. If you are a Mac user I recommend Omni Outliner which is very powerful. But after you have created an outline of your presentation, you should put the outline to the side and think about how to best presnt your work. Somtimes words will do just fine without any illustrations, sometimes illustrations can be helpful and PP isn’t a bad way to show illustrations. Just don’t use it as an outliner.

Whose fault is that? Is it PowerPoint’s, which makes it so easy to whip up a boring presentation? Is it students and scholars who don’t know how to use PowerPoint well? Or might it be that PowerPoint doesn’t adapt itself well to humanities/social scientific presentations? I can see PowerPoint being great if I’m reporting on my fieldwork or an archaeological site or doing a visual anthropological analysis of popular culture, but if I’m trying to explain social hierarchy, or religion, or deconstruction? Unless I have ready access to an archive of specialized imagery, what am I putting on the slides? Notes? I don’t use PowerPoint much because in most instances it would simply reproduce the stuff I already write on the board — and writing it on the board gives me the option of being flexible about the order I address topics in, etc. The only exception is when I have a large amount of visual information to get across — say for a section on racial stereotypes, or visual art. In effect, PowerPoint is my digital slide carousel — not an outliner, note-sharing program, or substitute teacher.

As someone said, PowerPoint is probably very effective for its primary purpose: selling stuff (whether products, business plans, or investment strategies). If you see teaching as selling a product, you probably have more luck with it than I do. I tend to belong more to the teaching-as-seduction school of thought, and so I’m not much more likely to find PowerPoint useful in my classes than I am to find it useful on, say, a first date.

Yet it is not only the students who are passive: this discussion has prompted me to revisit how Powerpoint constrains both myself and my students into passivity, particularly in large group teaching. We must cover the points in order, tick the boxes and file it away, mission accomplished, now the students know everything there is to know about ethnography/gift exchange/development etc. – and oh dear yes – I am sometimes (see Colin Danby) that lecturer who looks blankly at the next slide wondering what is written on it and why!

No longer!!

While still a teaching assistant I attended a seminar by Zygmunt Bauman, who, armed with a small piece of paper with no more than twenty words written in pencil on it held me spellbound for over an hour. That is what I aspire to. The question is how?

Doyle,
In my world that’s called one-to-many distribution of information. I think you are remarking on how the student must interact or ‘learn’ the information on their own in some way.

For the most part I think that reflects some degree of practicality on your part and yet I prefer a different vision of teaching.

What I would like to see from teachers are massive collaborative environments they create to teach. Primarily to better explore what interactivity means. The class room is a model of how difficult it is for one person to reach and teach x number of persons. A class size of 20 seems a blessing. Individual attention to a student a prize usually of wealthy districts.

Most teaching materials really don’t have a way to ‘interact’ in a specific engineered understanding of the student’s cognitive style. That’s the quality of individual attention interactivity relates to. Kids with learning disabilities to some degree get special support from teachers and adaptive equipment built to accommodate ‘disability’ of cognitive styles. But most students have to learn a kind of passivity about learning that the teacher above refers to as spoon feeding.

I think we all know that a human being really is social and passivity crushes those skills. I think computing tools built around collaboration would have social values we can’t impart in the current regime of learning. Essentially I think supporting the good will and desire of Denise and others like her.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor

The main problem for me is that I am expected (both by university/college and by students) to use some kind of technology to enhance learning and teaching. The flip side being that I cannot do it without! This expectation on behalf of the college/university is mediated by the installation of projectors and interactive whiteboards in every teaching room that have replaced the old overhead projectors – and the adoption of Moodle or Blackboard VLEs on which all teaching materials should be made readily available. It is inevitable that in this climate students will expect to be spoonfed information.

My own very small act of defiance is to make the powerpoint slides simple to the point of uselessness. Students missing lectures and picking my slides up from the VLE will not have an enlightening experience.

Hard science is meanwhile galloping ahead just as fast and needs game technology as a tool if students are to master all that must be learned and if members of the public are to glimpse the basics of high-concept science at all.

Doyle,
I’ve thought about this as a good project to provide teachers with much more powerful teaching tools. For example massive collaborations of students against problems that only teams can do.

And so,
thanks,
Doyle

Your mentioning of online teaching reminds me that I was just reading Buckminster Fuller’s 1962 publication, “Education Automation.” There he describes TVs with a special “beaming system” that would allow programming to be sent directly to each particular TV and for each TV to send information back. As he elaborates, “The child will be able to call up any kind of information he wants about any subject and get his latest authoritative TV documentary.” Fuller predicted that education would eventually primarily be through these devices, and that university faculty would stop teaching and start producing well-polished visual documentaries to broadcast to these special two-way TVs. He thought this would all happen within a decade. 44 years later, faculty meetings everywhere seem to be buzzing with trepidation …

These things can be done just as well in Powerpoint, but we lose openness. Not everyone can just run a Powerpoint document, if they don’t have the proper software, which costs money. HTML/CSS documents can be remarkably formatted and can be opened with the free Firefox web browser. If Dr. Wesch so desires, he can upload the page to the internet for all to see, not only his students.

Another benefit to using XML or HTML is that it is searchable by google and other such technologies, opening up the ability for researchers to access the presentation in a less linear fashion. This multi-linearity is something very flexible that Powerpoint does not do well, but is necessary if one wishes to keep the visual aid tailored to the flow of discussion.

It wouldn’t be difficult to add a blog to this format, and create a page for each lecture with its own comment section for clarification and discussion.