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Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

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PowerPoint Is Evil

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Originally posted by Mush:
Undergraduates love powerpoint, because they think they can throw the text away and simply study the slides.

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I had a professor who did all of those icky things I mentioned above. When students suggested that he be more organized and use more effective visual aids, he said "I'm not going to spoonfeed you". In other words, I have the right to be a shitty teacher because I have a PhD and I can intimidate you into not complaining by making disparaging remarks about your intellectual ability if you do.

One of the best professors I ever had used PowerPoint. Another one of the best professors I ever had did not use PowerPoint, but had excellent hand-outs so that students could really listen to what he was saying instead of scrambling to write everything down so they could go back later and pick out the main point. One of the worst professors I ever had used PowerPoint. He was well organized, but he always went off onto tangents that were self-indulgent, and spent way too much time on "housekeeping" (like demonstrating the class web site for the first hour of every class for the first three weeks). The very worst professor I ever had did not use PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is a very effective tool for organizing main points and keeping a professor on track and helping his listeners keep what he is saying fresh in their minds, especially if they're discussing difficult concepts. Sure, it can be misused. Sometimes people depend more on the cutesy visual effects than on the content. But that hasn't been my experience for the most part with professors who have used it. It's cheap snobbery to assume that visual aids are for the intellectually dull.

[ 20 August 2003: Message edited by: Michelle ]

other than the fact that it doesn't 'speak' with other microsoft programs well, ie. importing word or excel docs can be a bloody mess, it's a good standard and an effective tool.

The thing is that powerpoint is very user friendly compared to something like Photoshop or any number of other programs with animation in them.

Hats off to microsoft on this one.

Another trap that people fall into is using the effects/transitions inappropriately. There is a time for flashy transitions, but most often something very quick and simple is best. And unless it is imperative to your presentation, please automate the actions of the objects on the slide. Nothing is more irritating that that incessant clicking because the presenter has to click the mouse button for each word to appear on his/her slide.

Woah! Jumping the gun with the "intellectual dullness", I think. I'm talking about laziness...dullness is a whole other issue.
I agree with you that sometimes Powerpoint can be a good tool for keeping a lecture organized. I've found it particularly good for statistics, because it also saves me from writing formulae over and over, or drawing badly on the chalkboard. I've sat through classes myself in which we had to copy things down from an overhead- a complete waste of everyone's time.

But there is a lot to be said for a lecture which you need to actually pay attention and follow. A talk with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A narrative from which the listener is able to sort out the important points and transitions from their content and context, not because they are bulleted. I do think that a lot of younger people (I include myself here), being raised on (yes, I'm gonna say it) TV, naturally expect a certain um..."clarity", or at least that they shouldn't have to work too hard to follow. Many are very, very unhappy if they leave a classrooom and everything is not absolutely clear.

The best professor I have had so far used Powerpoint to briefly summarize each previous lecture, and then would go to the overhead projector for the actual lecture. I liked that synthesis.

The professor of organic chemistry that I took this summer would do all his lectures on Powerpoint. The biggest defect of this is that while it meant that he could concentrate on the lecture and just tap a key occasionally, organic chemistry can't be taught that way. It is virtually a requirement that students have to see reaction mechanisms get drawn out for them to see the connections. Since organic chemistry relies heavily on mechanisms, this is why I think the class averages were so low - few people could grasp the mechanisms very well.

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NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ''It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,'' the board sternly noted.

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