I’ll admit to producing a few PowerPoints presentations in my time, but not that many … really!
In fact, I’ve even broached the idea with a few colleages (and students in my curriculum seminar last term) that powerpoint has a “controlling” if not “silencing” effect on classroom interactions—absolute heresy in an era when it seems powerpoint is de rigueur in the university classroom (at least among folks who think good pedagogy can be had by merely adding technology to the classroom).
But I never really thought about powerpoint as Stalinist pedagogy, until now…
Well, seems I’m not alone as Edward R. Tufte has produced a devasting indictment of powerpoint in his essay “The cognitive style of powerpoint”, where he argues:
In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?
Here’s another sample from the Tufte’s essay: Powerpoint does rocket science
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