PowerPoint Bad For Learning 439
cute-boy writes "This article in the Sydney Morning Herald reporting on research done at The University of NSW suggests the use of Microsoft PowerPoint (and similar products) in lectures and meetings actually makes it harder to absorb facts, rather than being a reinforcement of key points."
Who's at fault though? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought it was common knowledge that creating a presentation with brief bullets was the "proper" way to do it. There's no point in even doing a presentation if you're just going to read off the slides, you may as well email it out and not waste people's time.
Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:5, Informative)
How to Best Use PowerPoint (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How to Best Use PowerPoint (Score:5, Informative)
There is a dissenting opinion [jnd.org] by Don Norman, by the way.
Re:How to Best Use PowerPoint (Score:5, Interesting)
For example:
One of Tufte's most important points is that most people tend to dumb down the data to fit the presentation, rather than adapt the presentation so that it can effectively convey all the information. Norman's response amounts to saying "No, you don't understand!" Instead, Norman should back up his assertion that presentations should go light on meaningful data.
The above paragraphs assume that a presenter who has developed his slides according to Tufte's ideals will still present them the way they would present lists of bullet points. If somebody takes the time to develop an effective chart, odds are that they will take the time to explain it and point out the more important trends that it reveals. It is not counterproductive if an audience member also notices a trend that you do not have time to talk about. To assume that it would be counterproductive, as Norman consistently does, it to assume that your audience is stupid, or at least slow on the uptake. With that condescending attitude, your presentation is guaranteed to be bad.
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He made the presentation engaging, took on the audience's skepticism, showed real-world examples and objects, DID provide a handout, and captivated us all day long.
I took away a brain-full of new ideas and information.
Two problems for the real-world, though:
1. Not everybody is Tufte. He's a great presenter. A lot of my college professors were well-meaning schlubs, and I was able to doze through my 7:30 AM classes
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By the way, I'm not trying to be a shill for Tufte. I just think that Norman's essay isn't the kind of thing to be holding up as good criticism o
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I'm familiar with books by Tufte and Norman and have attended Tufte's presentation on presenting information. I think Tufte's writings on PowerPoint may fail to emphasize the main problems, but it seems to me that Tufte and Norman are largely in agreement. Norman states,
Re:How to Best Use PowerPoint (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking of Edward Tufte, check out 'The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching out Corrupts Within' for an excellent critique on the misuse of PowerPoint and a primer on the best way to use this tool.
At the core of Tufte's argument is the notion that PowerPoint (and other slideware) encourages intellectual laziness on the part of the presenter, because it allows a presenter to build a presentation around the software, using it as a crutch. Instead of thinking through complex information and then determining how to augment the oral presentation with selected PowerPoint information, most presenters dumb down the subject matter for PowerPoint. The result is a presentation that has been dumbed-down to suit the needs of the software, not the audience. The presenter is happy, Microsoft is happy, but the audience is not being well-served.
Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:5, Informative)
By the way, if you find you need to distract people's eyes while you are rambling, it's a sign that the problem is with your rambling, not with the powerpoint. Make your speech interesting enough and you won't need to worry about that.
The apple keynote [apple.com] for your convenience. The iphone introduction is especially good. It might be worth noting that a lot of Jobs' 'reality distortion field' is just that he doesn't bore people when he talks. Compare his presentation to that of the cingular CEO at the end of the movie and you'll see what I mean.
iPhone != rocketScience (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we all have, and it is true hell, and creates immediate distrust in the presenter.
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Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:5, Insightful)
Once my friend and I realized that he was just reading the textbook, we started leaving fifteen minutes into the class, just to make sure we weren't missing anything. Once he complained about that being "rude", we started alternating, bringing other work to do in class, or just not showing up. Can't say it made a lick of difference.
Side note: on top of all that, it was a 200 level class on Data Structures, and the prof spent the first several weeks of class telling us how to comment our code. He returned the first of five assignments we'd turned in on the last day of class, at which point I realized that every project I'd done in the class had been "miscommented." "You know," I told him, "it would have been really useful to know you didn't want me to comment them this way before we had to turn the second, third, fourth, and fifth projects."
He shrugged. "Sorry." Ass.
(Sorry. Venting complete.)
Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would have complained right back that it's rude to read from the book when he's supposed to be teaching! And then I would have gone to the dean of students or the registrar or whoever and demanded a refund of my tuition.
Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:5, Insightful)
And then what would happen? You would be short of a full load, waiting to take the class the next quarter/semester. Praying the whole time that the asshole isn't the ONLY guy who teaches that level 200 course.
Not to mention also praying that the course is offered at all in the next quarter or semester!
If either one of those things turns out to be true (which is almost certain), Then YOU are the ass, as you will end up delaying your graduation date because of one prick and one class that you couldn't handle.
In a perfect world we go to college to get educated and you would spend the 10 years there battling it out with the adminstration to get the education you deserve for your money.
In reality, most people just want to graduate so they can get on with their lives.
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During a class on child development I took last semester, everyone had to do a presentation in front of the rest of the class on a particular topic. Most people crammed all the information on the slides and read them verbatim, much like you describe. My group, on the other hand, just put a few bullet points on each slide, and interspersed them with visuals that helped convey the points I was making. I also threw in a few exercises where the class could participate, such as a sequence of pictures where th
Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:4, Funny)
And not a Microsoft Word, an actual Word.
Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. I read Tufte's rants on PowerPoint when I was in college, and that was quite a few years back. I agree with his disappointment with PowerPoint [edwardtufte.com]. Of course people can make worthwhile presentations with it. The problem is that PowerPoint sort of encourages people to focus on everything but the actual information.
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The problem, as I see it, is that you want to present two or three complicated parts and then explain their interrelation, but then you can't fit it all into one neat slide.
A paper or article can discuss much more compl
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Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some meetings seem like college classes where everyone is copying down pages of notes about what is being displayed instead of listening to what is being said or actually trying to comprehend the subject matter.
Also, know your audience should be on that list. I've seen way too many presentations where someone is going into painful implementation details with management people who don't understand the implementation, don't understand the details, and only want to distill a 10 second sound bite out of the whole presentation.
Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:5, Informative)
Sending out notes ahead of time does not help (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently taught a college level science course that is typically taken by non-science majors to fulfill graduation requirements. The other instructors in our department recommended that I make my PowerPoint slides available on the course web site before the lectures. When I started doing this, I found that about 75% of the class did stopped coming to the lectures. Warning the students that they would miss important material from demonstrations, discussions, and in-class activities if they skipped lectures did not make any difference in attendance. The students who were interested in the course and willing to do the work to earn good grades downloaded the notes, came to the lectures, and participated in class discussions and activities. Unfortunately, most of the students were only taking the class because their academic advisers forced them to take it or because they were expecting an easy "A." These students downloaded the notes, frequently skipped class, did not participate in class discussions, and then complained that their low test scores were due to my bad teaching, not their lack of effort. Making the PowerPoint slides available before a lecture only helps the students who actually want to learn. If the students aren't willing to take an active role in their own learning experience, nothing the instructor does will help them to learn or retain the material presented in class.
The same basic idea applies to business meetings and conferences. If you're not paying attention and being an active listener, then it does not matter whether or not the presenter is a good speaker or uses PowerPoint. Having a copy of the slides beforehand does not matter if you decide to skip the meeting since you already have the notes. It also does not help having the slides ahead of time if you do not study them to prepare for the meeting, or if you just sit there passively listening during the meeting. People learn better and retain more when their minds are actively engaged in a presentation through note-taking or discussions of the material being presented.
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Why did our project fail?
Where did all of our money go anyway?
How much are we spending on these powerpoint presentations?
Who cares about this meeting anyway?
What did I do wrong to be subjected to a 60 page powerpoint?
Future projects that are going to fail because the only forethought that went
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Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:4, Funny)
add a walking dollar bill animated graphic to everything, in fact more animations are better.
Use lots of clipart all over your slides.
always use a busy animated background.
Include screenshots of a spreadsheet that are too damn tiny to see anything.
cheezy humor.
At least that is what I guess they are teaching at colleges, out new director of marketing that has a MBA in communication and Business Must have went to a powerpoint training class at Notre Dame. BTW, he puts his degrees and alma-matter on EVERY fricking presentation he does.
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1) Use white/yellow text on dark background if you can, it is easier to read.
Actually, AT&T discovered back in 1989 that for some users light text on a dark background glows [or "halates"] making the text harder to read. If the goal is to make your presentations "universal" [and to avoid ADA/508 lawsuits for creating inaccessible educational material], the rule is DON'T use white/yellow text on a dark background.
See "Open Look: Graphical user interface style guidelines."
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You also have the factor that presenters who feel their slides are self-contained may not be as motivated to prepare or practice their deliver
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What topic do you present, if I may ask? When I give photography presentations the bulk of my slides are photos, interspersed with some summary text here and there when the subject is of a technical nature.
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I can't remember where I heard it, but if you need Powerpoint to explain a point or to keep the audiences attention then you just aren't a very good presenter.
Now I've given Powerpoint presentations myself, but usually to show screen shots of how an application works. Even if you are the greatest speaker in the world, you can't really describe menu structures to people and hope for them to remember it without seeing the application.
But my bad
Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, it's best if your slides have NO BULLET POINTS. They are a visual aid, designed to allow you to display visual information. That means slides like charts, graphs, photographs, logos, etc. When you're discussing something that lacks a visual aid, the slide should show nothing more than the topic of discussion. That helps keep listener attention on yourself, and not on your slides.
Watch Steve Jobs give a presentation sometime. Notice how the attention is almost always focused on Jobs. The only time it's not is when he explicitly directs your attention to some sort of demonstration or visual aid on the background screen.
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The answer, of course, is "don't".
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This, however, is the problem in many ways. The small amount of text in these sorts of slides is hardly enough to actually communicate the point. Reading someone's powerpoint slides and trying to infer or remember what they were saying is usually rather difficult.
I disagree completely!!! From my experience slides that are shared among people with a common background are usually trivial to decipher with very minimal text. When one of my colleagues or coworkers either presents or sends me a set of slides, chances are good that I will know immediately what they were getting at. ESPECIALLY, if they provide me with a sentence or two on that sl
Re:Who's at fault though? (Score:5, Informative)
Passive vs. Active Listening (Score:3, Interesting)
Their conclusions do not fit my own personal experiences or what I was taught in my graduate level courses on pedagogical methods at all. Also, I don't think that pictures are much different from written information, since reading words and interpreting a graph both require processing visual information. Graphs and diagrams are also useless without legends and axis labels written out in words, so you can't avoid the wri
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If a presenter is reading their own slides, it is a dead givaway that they dont really know the subject matter. If a presenter only glances at a slide to see where they are, need to skip ahead, or spend extra time on a particular point through prior audience request, then you have a hope of learning something from that person, which IS THE POINT.
You are not supposed to be learning from the slides, just getting information about what you are hopefully going to learn from the speak
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This is true of nearly all sales pitch presentations. Tufte worked on both Shuttle disasters, so he mentions them a lot, and in some of the presentations he criticizes the entire point behind them was to deflect blame. Lockheed Martin didn't want their wing design to
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Yes. Powerpoint is pretty much the Saturday Night Special of presentation "aids". There were plenty of bad presentations back in the olden days, but at least the format forced you to consider what you were doing. When slides were actual 35mm slides or overhead proje
WRONG. (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft forces those who will be giving public presentations to take a one week training course on doing it right. It was jokingly called 'Touch-Turn-Talk' school, for those of us hired who were not comfortable public speakers. Probably the best career enhancement class I ever took. We were videotaped and able to see along with our classmates the the true extent of our suckage.
At the end of the class, the improvement was amazing.
No company should allow anyone to sp
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I guess the bosses get an exemption. Pity.
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And sorry, but "They have larger issues on their minds?" What the hell is larger than making a major presentation for a major product launch, for the company they're in charge of? How much their options have sucked in the last five years?
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation (Score:3, Funny)
And now please welcome President Abraham Lincoln.
Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It's great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn't live without it, could we? Oh - is it ready? OK
Re:Only on /. (Score:4, Funny)
I saw a Powerpoint presentation on this! (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait,.......
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I saw a Powerpoint presentation on this! So naturally its true!
Are you sure? I wasn't paying attention...
I have prepared a presentation... (Score:2)
Slideshows... not PP (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nothing seems to induce brain death quicker than holiday snaps.
Maybe the two problems are connected.
Bing! You win a prize (Score:3, Interesting)
I once had a Calculus prof whose lectures were awful. This was pre-powerpoint: he used transparencies and an overhead projector. All he would do is plop something on the overhead, read it to us, and then plop down the next slide, and repeat.
One day the overhead was broken. Without a blink of an eye he picked up a piece of chalk and began lecturing the old fashioned way, writing down stuff on the blackboard. The prof was transfo
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I think this perfectly illustrates the problem with Powerpoint. When you watch a lecture with blackboard and chalk, you actually see the ideas de
Slides? (Score:4, Insightful)
Please ask questions after my presentation (Score:5, Funny)
Slide 2: Cheese
Slide 3: Conclusion
Thank you, I will now take questions from the audience.
Re:Please ask questions after my presentation (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Please ask questions after my presentation (Score:5, Funny)
Next question please.
Re:Please ask questions after my presentation (Score:5, Funny)
No, the cheese stands alone.
Re:Please ask questions after my presentation (Score:5, Funny)
Slide 1: TFA
Um, okay, so my name is Tod, and, um, I'm gonna talk to you today about the, um article. We call it, um, TFA, which stands for
-Their right The first point I want to make is, that, okay, basically, they're right. They said, you know, information that's correct. "I think you misspelled they're." *awkward pause* "Um, oh, yeah, okay, I'll have to
-They make good points Basically, they make a lot of good points.
-They are smart And they really made some good analysis, basically, they're really smart.
Slide 2: Cheese
Now, I want to talk about cheese for a minute
-Tastes good One of the advantages of cheese is that it tastes good. You know, when you eat cheese, it tastes really good, so you know, you want to have a lot of it.
-Great with sandwiches You can add cheese to sandwiches, that's one of the things that makes it good, and then the sandwiches taste really good.
-Bad for you But gotta watch out, it's bad for you.
Slide 3: Conclusion
=The article: Correct So, I just want to say, in, uh, conclusion, the article is correct.
=Cheese: Jury's still out Jury's uh, still out on the matter of cheese.
Ring a bell, anyone?
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http://cla.calpoly.edu:16080/~cjenning/ [calpoly.edu]
That's my design professor's set of slides. He reads them word for word. When he's in a particularly good mood, he paraphrases what he just said after every slide.
Also: He teaches design.
Let me emphasize because it's vaguely important: DESIGN.
He also uses clip-art in his syllabus. And no, I'm not joking.
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Next question please.
The most interesting blurb from the article (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just an idea...
Oblig. Tufte (Score:5, Informative)
See also: information presentation expert Edward Tufte's essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint [edwardtufte.com].
Re:Oblig. Tufte (Score:5, Insightful)
He doesn't like Microsoft style graphs. While you can create a graph from inside Powerpoint, you are actually doing in in MS Graph (or some similar name). He doesn't like 'chartoonery', but that isn't Powerpoints problem either. Gaudy slide backgrounds and car crash noises probably fit though.
What he is actually unhappy about is more that many people trade in visual tricks for good quality data and analysis. You can hide the fact that you entirely missed the causal variable in your analysis of rocket motor O-ring failure if you enthrall the audience with little rocket motor shaped pictures on your graphs. A more accurate title for the essay you quote might have been "The Cognitive Style of Computer Software", because there are a whole lot of bits and pieces of programs that go into making all these stupid presentations. Tufte will even admit that Powerpoint is just fine for feeding slides to your projector, just don't actually create content in it.
We Knew That . . . (Score:2)
But, we already knew that. How many of us complain when the presentation speaker simply reads the power point slides to us? The best practice is to give short, simple phrases as cues that helps organize the listener's understanding of t
Power corrupts. . . (Score:5, Funny)
Power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.
--Edward Tufte
Typical media spin (Score:5, Informative)
bad teachers, not bad software (Score:3, Insightful)
However, this guy isn't decrying the effectiveness of visual aids. We can thank Dimitry Martin for that proof (observe his visual aids when explaining the google/viacom spat: http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/Google_Youtube_Viacom_
-dave
Powerpoint bad for learning (Score:2)
I write a presentation and I get told I use too many words, sum it up take some out and make it shorter and the words bigger. Until it is bullet points, five per page, with pictures. Of course some information will be lost that way. If I do it the way I want to do it, I get a lower grade and people get bored and lose interest in the presentation. The presentation is an important part of some college classes.
Simple solution: PowerPoint is *only* a visual aid (Score:5, Informative)
Less is more (Score:2)
Much of PowerPoint banned in military 10 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
One fellow, working for the Pentagon, said the military had tired of PowerPoint presentations,
where individuals took great effort to produce graphics and sound,
at the opportunity cost of content.
The presentations became more like juveniles showing off their songs and
latest toys.
Large sections of the military then banned much of PowerPoint,
particularly sound and glittering graphics.
I myself continue making presentations with the most difficult
but most thought-out of tools, LaTeX,
which is actually a mathematical book publishing tool.
Re:Much of PowerPoint banned in military 10 years (Score:3, Informative)
I myself continue making presentations with the most difficult but most thought-out of tools, LaTeX, which is actually a mathematical book publishing tool.
Prosper [sourceforge.net] has all the glitz you need anyway.
Designers are paid $$$$ for a reason: (Score:5, Insightful)
In skilled hands, PowerPoint can be a powerful tool. But it can just as easily ruin a meeting or presentation if the user doesn't know what he's doing...
Powepoint? TeX and LaTeX were extremely bad (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, it has nothing whatsoever with my ability to understand or the ability of the author to communicate, it all the fault of the tool used.
Other Powerpoint Opponents (Score:3, Informative)
What we've suspected all along (Score:4, Funny)
This is your brain.
This is your brain on PowerPoi...what was the question again?
PowerPoint is not the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Its presenting exact same information in the same manner (i.e., the same words) in multiple different formats simultaneously hurts retention. As John Sweller states in TFA:
Of course, anyone who has taken a basic speech class that discusses effective use of visual aids would know that's exactly the wrong use of a visual aid, computerized or otherwise. So, while its interesting research that reveals that what is widely accepted by experts in the field of communication to be a bad practice is actually demonstrably counterproductive to recall rather than merely an annoyance to the audience that isn't an optimum use of resources, its not any kind of particular blow against PowerPoint, presentation software, or visual aids in presentation, just further reinforcement that having an easy-to-use tool to produce and display visual aids doesn't replace understanding how to effectively use them.
Only one guide is necessary. (Score:5, Interesting)
Presentation Zen [presentationzen.com]. Definitely read their contrast of presentations given by Gates and Jobs [blogs.com]. On a personal note, I can proudly say I have never given a presentation with bullet points. I tried hard to give up that crutch and the result has always been commendation afterwards. My audiences have described my presentations as fluid, participatory, and engaging. Avoiding bullet points at least proves you know your material. Also remember that your presentation is there to enhance what you have to say, and not the other way around.
The proper conclusion: (Score:3, Interesting)
Most people can't create good presentations.
(I know I'm not the first to put this comment here; the real reason I'm commenting is that I want to describe how I make PowerPoint presentations...)
I do a lot of technical presentations. I imagine that I am explaining the topic to someone interactively using a white board (which is always very effective). Then I just make slides containing a cleaned up (and often animated) version of what I would have put on that white board. No whole-paragraph bullet points or long blocks of text.
Research all they want (Score:3, Funny)
Narrator: that's when you'll catch a flash of Tyler's contribution to the film.
[the audience is watching the film, the pornography flashes for a split second]
Narrator: Nobody knows that they saw it, but they did...
Tyler Durden: A nice, big, cock...
How to Give a Bad Talk (Score:3, Insightful)
More advice from Dave Messerschmitt [berkeley.edu].
Re: PP, I agree with some other posts I've seen here that PP can be used badly or well. Most of the aweful PP talks I've seen would have been just as bad (and possibly worse) with another technology.
That said, it's not as though all tools for a given task are equivalent. I'm a lot more likely to make a long straight cut using a table saw with a guide than I am using a hand saw without a guide (and possibly even with).
In this regard, I don't think PP is nearly as bad an offender as MS Word, because Word makes it far too easy to do bad things, like ignore styles, and hard to do good things, like use styles instead of one-off formatting. (In fairness, it seems to be improving, but is still a far cry from, say, FrameMaker from 1992.)
Educational professionals say "This is crap" (Score:5, Interesting)
People who are heavy visual learners will tune out what the speaker is saying and just read what's on it. Most of the stuff that the speaker is saying is near insensible anyway because those paths aren't very good at absorption. For heavy auditory learners, you could have almost anything on the slide, but it wouldn't matter unless the speaker described it. The power point isn't redundant to the speaker, it's a backup, in case the audience contains heavy visual/poor auditory learners.
The best teachers in the industry also include segments where they have their students moving physically about the classroom. One well-known teacher of teachers has an example where he gets across the difference between parallel and serial by having the students line up and walk across a line, and then walk across the line in groups. The idea behind exercises is to appeal to the cognitive learners.
It's fine for people to say that it clogs the pathways when you try to absorb things through two channels at once, but for most of us it's an either/or, where we pick the one that best suits us.
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No, they just fail to accord with your expectations based on your beliefs about how multiple learning styles should make the results turn out.
Powerpoint is the problem (Score:4, Insightful)