The Evolution of Digital Rectangles [Electronic Slides]
When I first began using PowerPoint in middle school, I was excited by the fact that people could see my thoughts in a text format while I spoke to each of those points in a formal presentation. I utilized the program heavily in my high school years, and so did my teachers for disseminating their lecture notes. Slides often consisted of bullet point after bullet point of text, including nested bullets to demonstrate a subtopic or relational meaning. These bullet points required you to summarize thoughts in a more succinct manner due to the lack of digital real estate on which one could elaborate further. At the time, I could never fathom the ability of the words on the screen to directly teach my audience; I never considered my that they may have background knowledge about the content I was talking about. In fact, every presenter and teacher I had encountered had spoken to each bullet point enthusiastically, almost utilizing the slides themselves as cue cards or speaker notes. And so I did the same.
Fast forward to my teaching years, and I have discovered that people really don’t like a lot of text on a presentation slide. It was constantly apparent that professional development presenters in the educational sphere were relying on more and more on visual prompts to facilitate their speaking points, with very little text on the slides to support their points. Often, if there was text, it was a web URL, or a single word or phrase, using the text as a visual aid to enunciate a core message in their presentation. While this is all anecdotal evidence, it indeed points to the fact that perhaps there is a “Breakthrough of the Visual” occurring in not only our digital domains but our in-person formal communication experiences as well (Bolter, 2001, 23%).
In fact, later in UBC MET, I was introduced to the work of Edward Tufte (2003; 2006) who advocates that PowerPoint and associated slide tools are “corrupting” effective and meaningful communications in the settings that they are utilized. He uses the bullet point as a weapon for his main argument that “PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content” (Tufte, 2003). Other scholars such as Adams (2008) chime in, providing evidence to support the fact that PowerPoint may “superced[e] a variety of classroom practices and potentially render[ ] obsolete valuable, perhaps critical knowledge forms” (p.285). Those are very heated arguments against the use of a linear progression of digital rectangles as a presentation medium.
In Kress’ (2005) paper, he states that our “distinct cultural technologies for representation have become conflated… so that the decline of the book has been seen as the decline of writing and vice versa” (p.6). The need for text/writing may decline in the instance of presentations for two reasons: 1) The audience is smart enough to read text on the Internet, so why would they attend a talk to do the same thing?, and 2) The speaker’s job is to illuminate the content; if there is text, it may give that content away, decreasing the speaker’s resonant value. This suggests that the cultural presentation technologies of our time – a series of linear digital rectangles – has also pushed presenters into providing more visual supports in order to strengthen their relationship with the audience, and to increase the weight on the speaker to deliver inspirational content through oral methods of communications instead of through text.
In light of these shifts in formal presentations, there are now boundless online resources on the topic of good slide design. For example, this TED blog directly suggests: “With text, less is always more.” This one by Garr Reynolds, suggests the same: “Limit bullet points & text”. It is beginning to seem like my anecdotal hunch was on to something: there is an increased emphasis on speaker oral support of visual slides in our presentation world. The “Breakout of the Visual” is not just occurring on the web; we are coming to expect it in person, too.
References
Adams, C. (2008). “The Poetics of PowerPoint”. Explorations in Media Ecology, 7(4), 283-298.
Bolter, J. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, 2nd ed. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.
Stefan Erschwendner (Photographer), (2011). “#24 slide of the week” [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefanerschwendner/5863763030
Kress, G. (2005). “Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning”. Computers and Composition, 22(1), 5-22. doi: 10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004
Tufte, E. (2003). Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09
Tufte, E. (2008). The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. Graphics Press LLC: Cheshire, Connecticut.
I enjoyed reading your post and it is amazing how similar our PowerPoint experiences are. I remember my first experiences with PowerPoint in my class. I think back and cringe at the thought of it. I remember attending a professional development opportunity about presentation software and one of the instructional strategies was to use a different colour of text on your PowerPoint for anything that you wanted your students to write down. I think this is exactly what Tufte (2003) is talking about when he suggests that PowerPoint is disrupting and dominating content. Students and teachers become removed from the lesson as the slide takes the most prominent role in the classroom. This leaves little room for discussion and debate about content.
I also think of our yearly anaphylaxis training. Every year we are presented the same set of slides as the public health nurse reads them to us. We are then given paper copies of the slides for our records. Interior Health likes this option because it is easy to insure that all audience members receive exactly the same information. Staffs hate this format because it is time consuming, boring and it feels a little bit condescending. I feel for the nurse that is presenting the slideshow because she or he becomes less of a health expert as they pass on the predetermined content in the same tired slide show to school after school.
When I have seen PowerPoint used effectively is when it contains very little if any text. PowerPoint is useful in that it can include hypertext and the presenter can quickly and easily click a link to navigate to a webpage or internet resource. I find these links helpful when I receive digital copies of presentations after conferences or meetings.
James.
Hi James,
Thanks for your comment. I know /exactly/ what slide show you’re talking about for anaphylaxis training, and you’re right: it’s designed for uniformity, but a side effect is to bore people to tears. The only time my staff ever lights up in that training is when they get to play with the demo epipens.
I agree with your last paragraph about the least amount of text possible on the slides; after all, that was the entire point of my post! The transition for me The tool for slidedecks that I predominantly use now is Google Slides. Not only can I hypertext my slides, but people at my presentations can go to my live links, follow along, interact, and take the resource home with them to continue to utilize. Unless someone using desktop Powerpoint goes to the trouble of embedding it within their own website, or creating a mail merge to the attendees following the presentation, it is not as easy to share (if they’re an Office365 subscriber, then I presume they can do similar things to Google).
Thank you for your post. I found it very interesting and I had to laugh at myself throughout as I am still very much a ‘PowerPoint’ person myself. I am not technologically inclined and I have not worked as much as I should have, obviously, at developing my technology skills over the past fifteen years. I have spent most of my time as a teacher working in a learner support role, which means my focus has been on adaptive technologies and programs like Kurzweil, Dragon, and so on. Programs to distribute information to a group of students have not been my focus as I have worked primarily with small groups of students supporting specific skill development, or supporting already existing courses. Having said that, I have now moved out of learner support and into the classroom, which is part of why I began the MET program this September. I recognize my deficiency in understanding and using technology and I want to learn more about how to effectively teach using current technology.
Just in the last two weeks, I can count three separate occasions when I have used PowerPoint to deliver information to a group; twice in the classroom, and once, I’m embarrassed to say, was for my video presentation for this course. As this is my first MET course and as I mentioned above, I have not spent time focusing on technology for group teaching in my own personal development, I do not yet have much experience with new information-distributing technologies. When asked to do the video presentation, I did look at a couple of other options, but none of the options seemed to be something that worked for me (for example, I looked at Storyboard, which I had heard of other teachers using, but had never tried myself). I ultimately decided to go with what I knew, PowerPoint, and to develop my knowledge of that program. I had never used audio/voiceover in a PowerPoint presentation before and I had definitely never converted a PowerPoint slideshow to video format before. One of the PowerPoint presentations I used in my classroom last week was for Remembrance Day and included a hypertext link to a music video, as well as links to three different websites with information on the World Wars. A week ago, I was quite proud of myself for my new-found ability to provide links in my PowerPoint slideshow. Now, I realize that I need to move out of my comfort zone very quickly as I am significantly behind the times, and the way in which I am delivering information to my students is not a way which will appeal to them, or help them learn as much as it could. I do try to keep the information on my slides limited, but at the same time, I do exactly what you mentioned your teachers used to do, which is use the slides as a cue card and I present my ideas from there. I always include a visual with each slide that is related to the topic, but now I wonder how much are my students really getting out of the presentation, especially in a grade 4/5 classroom where students struggle to attend for any length of time to begin with.
I certainly do agree that my students connect visually to information and I know I did as a child as well. The difference being, when I was growing up, the visuals I enjoyed did not move, flash, or change colours as children today are used to. Most, though not all as I live in a small community, of my students have access to electronic media at home. Unfortunately, even some my grade 4 students are playing games like “Call of Duty” which quite honestly horrifies me, but I also wonder, how can I compete with entertainment like that? Over the last couple of weeks, I have spent many hours trying to decide how to approach Remembrance Day with a group of children who are generally desensitized and cannot truly connect with the idea of a World War. I imagine the difficulty of delivering information effectively to children will become increasingly difficult as more and more technological advances are made, and unless we as educators are diligent in keeping up with ‘the times’ and the advances being made, then our lessons will make less and less of an impact on the minds we are trying to engage. I had not considered how limited a technology PowerPoint was until reading your post. So thank you for drawing my attention to this, and from here I will move forward to new technologies that might capture my students’ attention and focus their learning more effectively!
Do you have any suggestions for great platforms to deliver information from?
Mary,
I would love to clarify that I’m not saying PowerPoint in itself as a presentation tool is inherently bad and you shouldn’t be embarrassed to use it at all! It is the way in which it has been utilized – myself included – that makes it redundant in nature, according to Tufte and Adams. It’s not the tool that’s poor quality; we’re just bad presentation designers by nature! Our choices with the tool’s affordances is what results in this poor design… but we’re all always learning and growing to present our information in different ways. At least you’re learning faster than I did! 🙂
With that being said, there are a multitude of other tools out there that can serve us well. If you haven’t already checked out Rachel’s Popplet Rip.Mix.Feed, be sure to do so – there are a lot there! As for the learning curve, buckle in – I’ve been doing this steady for two years both through MET and as a technology hobbyist, and I’m constantly, constantly, constantly learning new things. The good news is that it gets easier. Most authoring have somewhat similar affordances across their platforms: buttons to create, buttons to cut, paste, delete, add, shift, crop, buttons to share, buttons to preview, and so on and so on. As you become familiar with more and more tools, you gain a bit of an expectation of what you’ll experience every time you open a new one, and sometimes, you even anticipate what new features could be added! My favourites include Explain Everything, Paper53, and Camtasia – I love working with highly visual platforms, personally. Keep working and don’t get discouraged. Google EVERYTHING you have a question about when you’re playing with a new web tool/app – it’s worth it!
Awesome! Thank you, Victoria! I will definitely check out of the platforms you have suggested as well as Rachel’s popplet Rip.Mix.Feed.
I really enjoyed reading your post and I think you brought up some very interesting points for discussion. In regards to the amount of text written on a PowerPoint slide, I completely agree that less is more. I remember attending lectures during my undergrad where I would feel disconnected and disengaged from the content because some instructors would simply repeat what was on the slide. And since there was so much writing on each slide, I would get a false sense of security that there would be sufficient information on it that I could go over it later and make sense of it. However, this was never the case. Looking back on it now, it becomes clear that there was too much information to keep me engaged and curious about the content, but not enough to help me gain a better understanding of the topics. When thinking about incorporating more visual, I could see how students would more apt to listen to what the lecturer has to say and connect what is said to what students see on the slide. Personally, I believe this would foster a deeper level of understanding and enhance students’ engagement and attention.
Rachel
I am so happy I read all these posts as I am doing a Keynote assignment with my grade 6/7 class. My intuition was saying keep the text down to a minimum! So, in reading this thread of posts, I feel more certain of how I will proceed and what I really want the students to do with their presentations! Very grateful to all.