Over at Effect Measure, Revere (or one of the Reveres, anyway, I'm not certain if they're plural or not) has posted another broadside against PowerPoint, calling it "the scourge of modern lecturing." This is something of a sensitive point for me, as I use PowerPoint for my lectures in the introductory classes. I've been using it this way for more than five years, and I like to think I've gotten to be pretty good at it. I fully expect this to be brought up in my tenure review, though, and to have to justify my use of PowerPoint in class.
Here's the thing: PowerPoint is a tool, nothing more. It doesn't make bad speakers into good speakers, or good speakers into bad speakers. The people you see giving boring and incoherent PowerPoint presentations? They'd be giving boring and incoherent presentations with regular slides or overhead transparencies. The people you see giving clear and inspiring presentations with PowerPoint? They'd give clear and inspiring presentations if they had to chisel their figures into stone tablets while they talked.
PowerPoint doesn't make presentations bad. It enables bad speakers to do a certain type of bad presentation very easily, but getting rid of PowerPoint won't change these people into good speakers. It just changes the mode of their badness slightly.
(Continued below.)
"Yes, PowerPoint is a tool," you say, "But I don't remember talks this bad at meetings in the past." That's because they're in the past. There has never been a time when all lectures were good lectures, just as there has never been a time when all pop music was good pop music. The lectures of the past seem better for the same reason that the pop music of twenty years ago seems better: because you've forgotten most of the crap.
Admittedly, I'm not old enough to remember a time when chalkboards were the standard presentation method at professional meetings-- by the time I started attending colloquia and then conferences in the early 1990's, everybody in physics was using overhead projectors. And with a bit of effort, I can recall innumerable bad talks using overhead transparencies, many of which were bad in very similar ways to the bad PowerPoint talks I see now.
In fact, most of the flaws of PowerPoint have direct analogues in the overhead transparency world. Too many slides? I once saw a student bring a full box of 50 slides for a 10-minute talk. Content-free bullet points? Lots of people did that with overheads. Distracting visual effects? Everybody's seen at least one talk where the presenter spent a couple of minutes trying to stack up three or four transparencies that were supposed to line up to show some clever effect. Or the bit where you cover two-thirds of the slide with a sheet of paper, and scoot it down to reveal one line at a time.
Yeah, it's true, there are failure modes with PowerPoint that you don't get with chalk on a blackboard. Nobody ever wrecked a chalk-talk with distracting animation effects. But there are failure modes with chalk that you don't see in PowerPoint-- I took E&M from a professor who could make every letter in the Greek alphabet look like a "Q". If you didn't watch carefully enough to catch the name of each symbol as he wrote it, you would find yourself staring at a blackboard covered with formulae that looked like "Q times q to the Q divided by Q times the square root of q." I have yet to see that done with PowerPoint.
I've seen the physics community make the transition from overhead transparencies to PowerPoint, and you know what? The people who gave good talks back when hand-written overhead slides were the norm, they still give good talks using PowerPoint. And the people who give terrible PowerPoint talks these days gave terrible talks using overhead transparencies back in the day.
I've seen a lot of good talks, and I've given a few, and good talks are all the same. The speaker knows the material backwards and forwards, the talk is well organized with a clear and logical flow, the important points are presented in a cleanly and efficiently, and the level is appropriate for the audience.
I've seen a lot of bad talks, and I've given a few, and bad talks are all the same. The speaker is unsure of the material or some aspects of it, the talk shows signs of being hastily put together (possibly from pieces of multiple different talks), the important points are buried in a sea of extraneous information and jargon, and the talk assumes knowledge that the audience doesn't have.
The mechanism used for the visual aids doesn't matter. A good talk is a good talk, and a bad talk is a bad talk, whether the words are displayed on PowerPoint slides, written on a chalkboard, or written in blood on the tanned hides of infidel goats.
Why do people complain about PowerPoint specifically? People complain about it because generations of students have been raised to believe that the default mode of presentation is chalk on a chalkboard, and any departure from that becomes something to latch onto as the cause of whatever you don't like. When I give bad lectures using PowerPoint, students complain about PowerPoint. If I gave the same bad lecture using nothing but chalk on a chalkboard, they wouldn't blame the chalk, they'd (correctly) blame the flaws in the lecture itself.
Why do we see so many bad PowerPoint talks? We see bad talks because we don't teach our students to give good talks. Not only do we not provide direct instruction in public speaking, we don't provide any real incentive to do the work necessary to give good talks-- or, for that matter, any disincentive to giving bad talks. Yeah, people who are exceptionally good speakers tend to get more speaking invitations, but sit in on a semester or two of a departmental colloquium series, and you'll see just as many bad talks as good ones-- probably more. Go to a scientific meeting, and you'll see way more bad talks than good ones. And it doesn't make a difference to most of the people presenting-- on a CV, a bad talk looks just the same as a good one.
(There are some benefits to good speaking-- if you get to the job interview stage, a good talk can make all the difference. I know for a fact that I have my current job in large part because I gave a very good talk when I interviewed here. But those occasions are relatively rare, compared to the times where all you really need to do is to show up and mumble, then add a line to your CV.)
If you want to improve the quality of presentations at scientific meetings, dictating the mode of presentation isn't going to do it. Eliminating PowerPoint might make a difference in the short term, as it would jar some people out of a rut, and force them to actually think about what they're doing, but in a few years, those people will settle down into a slightly different rut, and you'll get bad presentations done with chalk, or overhead slides, or interpretive dance, or whatever other mode you might require.
If you want to improve the quality of presentations at scientific meetings, you need to actively reward people for giving good presentations. Which is much harder than railing against any particular piece of software.
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I hate PowerPoint for lots of reasons you didn't mention here. The biggest of which is that so few presenters have style. The most interesting talk in the world is made less interesting when the figures are pulled right out of their PRL, complete with tiny fonts so you have no idea where that peak is. Or stretching the image file so the aspect ratio is screwed up and you get horrible pixelation. Or that colour font on that colour background that, hey, no one can read! Or comic sans, which shouldn't be allowed anywhere near anything academic.
Don't even get me started on the screen-saver turning on, an instant message window popping up (yes, this has happened at talks I've watched, and once from a very famous scientist too), the projector having problems with contrast, colour, mathematical formulae, etc, etc, etc. I'm not saying we should get rid of PowerPoint and the like entirely, but I definitely agree with you that we should be actively teaching students (and faculty!!) how to use PowerPoint effectively. A good starting point might be Edward Tufte's forum, where they rightly seem to complain about PowerPoint quite a bit.
I think I largely agree with you, with the caveat that I think Powerpoint has made it a bit easier to produce a bad talk - it only takes 10 minutes to pull together a few images, which means that people can get away with not really thinking at all about what they're going to say. And you're postively encouraged to use all those ugly fades and transitions...
While in grad school, the majority of chalk lectures I have seen have been far worse than the power point ones. Both Power Point and chalk are as you said tools. To give good lectures you actually have to know how to use them. My faculty members would stand in front of what they were writing on the board and talk to board instead of the audience when they used chalk. To make matters worse they actually talked faster with chalk in their hands. Using Power Point forced them to actually prepare lectures ahead of time instead of sometimes winging it. Not to mention it has made it easier to actually update their notes to correct mistakes and add new information which they were slow to do previously.
I think a lot of the antagonism for Powerpoint comes from the corporate world where there is a significant fraction of effort put into making (or listening to) Powerpoint presentations where before those people were actually doing their jobs, that is, real assigned tasks. All of a sudden many people have to give weekly meeting presentations on this, monthly hour longs on that, quarterly multi-day meetings... all because one can now whip that stuff up, where before everyone knew there was more effort effort involved. Everything gets chopped up into PP's as opposed to more thought out documents. Its very hard to get people today to actually review a dense document in a meeting anymore, that is have them actually read it beforehand and come with a list if issues, because people get these zillion PP's that are generally meaningless. (rant off...)
I think if you are giving lectures anyway then PP is fine, it's a little different emphasis.
Since you started out by mention how you use Powerpoint to teach, I'd like to comment on that. My experience is that teaching a class with powerpoint is much more dangerous than giving some sort of talk or presentation. Persons presenting with PowerPoint get sucked into the ease with which they send information flying across the screen. When you give some presentation on your research, I'm not supposed to understand or remember every detail. I'm trying to get the main points and understand the broad purpose. If I want all the details, I'll read a paper. When I'm a student in a class, however, all those tiny details (the ones you send flying across the screen with a click of a button) are the ones I'll be tested on. I've had problems with this as a student in physics and non-science classes. When teachers slow down enough to write it out on the chalk/whiteboard it gives students a chance to see it as it evolves.
Secondary down side to teaching with Powerpoint: too many students don't pay enough attention because they sit there thinking, "I don't have to pay attention, I'll just get the powerpoint from him off the class website."
Chad -- I'm with you completely, with one tiny spaztic exception. They aren't PowerPoint talks, any more than all tissues are Kleenex... they're computer presentations. (I use OpenOffice Impress.) But once we're past that bit of geekery....
I'm using computer presentations almost exclusively in my intro astro class. I've been ramping up from little to almost entirely. Now, many days, I don't touch the blackboard. When I do, it's usually in response to a question. Sometimes I'm doing interactive things (like my "expanding Universe" activity, or lecture tutorials) that are on paper, but otherwise I'm entirely on the computer. And I do think it works.
I've seen everything you describe -- good talks, bad talks. And, yes, computer presentations enable some bad talks, but people give bad talks in all formats.
The failure modes that bug me the most are the "everybody is using PowerPoint and it will all work together" assumption. You bring in your USB key, read in your talk... and half the fonts are messed up, none of the greek letters or bullets or symbols work right, etc. I've seen that fairly often. I've seen it on Macs, too, despite the fact that Mac people says it doesn't happen there. Myself, I insist on using my own laptop; if forced not to, I'd use a PDF file as the computer presentation.
Of course, there's also the problem that the laptop doesn't communicate with the projector, but that's just the modern-day analogue of the bulb on the overhead projector being burnt out and not being able to find a replacement.
I've also deliberately given a bad computer talk... I'll probably blog about that at some point.
-Rob
Persons presenting with PowerPoint get sucked into the ease with which they send information flying across the screen. When you give some presentation on your research, I'm not supposed to understand or remember every detail. I'm trying to get the main points and understand the broad purpose.
Clark -- I might debate with you the purpose of a research talk. Sometimes it's OK to brush over details... but people do it way too often. Particularly in a colloquium (as opposed to a seminar). A lot of colloquia could be improved if the speaker thought of it more as a public-outreach lecture than as a seminar! The idea that things aren't supposed to be understood is one of the scourges of colloquia.
It's a real danger to whip through too many slides in any talk or class. Absolutely. Of course, as Chad doesn't point out, it doesn't require computer slides to go too fast in class. Yeah, it might help enable it, but as Chad says, good lecturers know how to give good lectures.
I'm my intro astro class, it's rare for me (in a 50 minute class) to get through more than 10 or 12 slides... and some of those are relatively content-light. (I generally object to, though occasionally fail, the typical "too much information" slide.) This semester, I don't think that I've ever made it through more than 16 or 18 slides, although anybody with a little bit of Google-foo could find my course website and check up on me pretty quickly.
-Rob
Secondary down side to teaching with Powerpoint: too many students don't pay enough attention because they sit there thinking, "I don't have to pay attention, I'll just get the powerpoint from him off the class website."
I am, however, 100% with you on this one.
It will only get worse as lectures are available on podcasts.
One of two things will happen, though. Either you aren't really adding any value in your lecure, in which case the students are right. Or, you do add value, and the students who will end up with the highest grades will figure that out pretty quickly at the beginning of the term.
-Rob
I fine myself disagreeing with some of what you've written here. The fact that clear organization, specific content, and speaker knowledge matter very much to the quality of a talk doesn't mean that the "mechanism used for the visual aids doesn't matter." Everything matters in a talk.
Some visuals are easier to present in one mode and some in another. Surely you wouldn't argue that trying to draw on a chalkboard sketches of the appearance of a newly discovered animal has just the same effect as showing the slides of clear original color photographs?
The relentless left-right linear nature of PowerPoint can get on some people's nerves, and the distracting movement plus the lower lighting too often required can distract from a feeling of personal contact with the speaker as well as make it harder for people to make notes of ideas/questions on issues they are especially interested in.
It also isn't the case that a negative response to the PowerPoint can be assumed to be really a negative response to the talk. Over the years, I've heard many, many responses to University presentations along the lines of "Really interesting talk, if you can ignore the PowerPoint enough to focus on what's being said," and "You'd think somebody that creative and interesting wouldn't have dragged his presentation down with that PowerPoint," and "How offensive. He's brilliant, all right, but does he really think we're so stupid that we need to have every point he makes flashed up on the wall?"
Well, I'm just into my second year of physics at the University of York, but have attended enough talks and lectures to have a preference.
For talks, powerpoint is a powerful tool. I have given one already (at the end of a group project in the first year), and it made it far easier to create a flowing talk. Those talks I have attended using powerpoint tend to be easy to follow, other than the times when a talk has no obvious focus.
Basicaly, if you have a direction and flow for your talk, you can make a powerpoint presentation that makes it easier to talk about it, and helps others understand.
It also means that people don't have to struggle with my indecipherable handwriting. I have to give a talk this year using an OHP, and it looks like being a real problem.
Lectures can be a problem if, as mentioned above the file is avaliable online. However, my first Mechanics course last year got around this and made things a lot more interesting. We were given printouts of each lectures slides at the start, only with gaps left for equations, diagrams and certain key notes. We would have to fill these in as they were explained during the lecture. You ended up taking a lot of extra notes, and had time to take in the ideas as you were not scribbing down details as you went.
I definitely think that PP for research talks are very valuable, when done correctly. But the use of PP for teaching is more interesting. Having a script, like the PP slides, allows an instructor to fall into the "giving a talk" mode instead of the "teaching a class". If you have a 300-person class, you may want to mostly be lecturing, but it's really important to allow interaction as well. Giving a class with PP requires the instructor to specifically design interactive activities (above and beyond "any questions?"). Writing on a whiteboard definitely encourages interaction more. But, of course, it's a real pain to show complicated graphs in classes where that's relevant.
In my opinion, an excellent lecture class would have PP slides, would have several structured non-lecture sorts of activities to keep students from tuning out and let them interact with the material, and the hardware would include a tablet screen, so it's easy to scribble on the PP, fill in blanks, note interesting points from students, etc. That technological solution allows much more interactive PP talks...
The failure modes that bug me the most are the "everybody is using PowerPoint and it will all work together" assumption. You bring in your USB key, read in your talk... and half the fonts are messed up, none of the greek letters or bullets or symbols work right, etc. I've seen that fairly often. I've seen it on Macs, too, despite the fact that Mac people says it doesn't happen there. Myself, I insist on using my own laptop; if forced not to, I'd use a PDF file as the computer presentation
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This is probably the best advice. Power Point is not the only way to prepare "slides" nor to present. In fact you can probably prepare better slides using a program like Illustrator than PP. The portable document format is great when you want to present another person's machine. Great way to have them printed out as well. Power Point and Keynote though do have the advantage of being able to show movies within the same document.
As for the Power Point version issue and those little quirks you mentioned messing up, I am a Mac person and I am all too aware of it. Drives me up the wall. I could understand why it happens more if I was switching between say PP and Keynote and not between different versions of the same program.
Er, it seems this didn't actually post the first time I tried, so a few people have already made a few of my points ...
I think you're mushing together several different kinds of "talks" here. There's the talk-talk, like at a conference or for a colloquium, where the presentation is completely planned and timed and rather inflexible; there will be graphs and pictures and bullet points, all of which are quite conducive to using PowerPoint. But if the talk is good, then there will be a minimum number of equations, because the speaker wants the audience to be able to follow along, even if it is a theory talk.
The other kind of "talk" is the classroom lecture (though, admittedly, classes like an introductory astronomy class to 300 students kind of fall in the middle and are much better suited to PowerPoint). The chalkboard is good for the lecture because, for starters, it forces the lecturer to speak and display equations at a rate at which the student can physical write. A flawless, seamless lecture can be given on slides without the lecturer being aware of the rate at which they are going through the material, which is often disastrous. A chalkboard is also much more real-time flexible than prepared slides: you can't circle and cross things out and write things over to the side after a student asks a question when using slides, but you can on a chalkboard (unless you are using overhead projector slides instead of PowerPoint, which is rarely done these days). The only times I've seen "PowerPoint" work well in a class-with-equations was when it was an extra, multimedia approach, reserved for when fancy graphs and animations actually added to the material. I'm not saying a good technical lecture can't be given with PowerPoint; I just haven't seen it done.
But just as long as everyone agrees that chalkboards are vastly superior to those nasty whiteboards....
Clark: Since you started out by mention how you use Powerpoint to teach, I'd like to comment on that. My experience is that teaching a class with powerpoint is much more dangerous than giving some sort of talk or presentation. Persons presenting with PowerPoint get sucked into the ease with which they send information flying across the screen.
Yes, absolutely. But you can easily blow a class away with nothing more than chalk on a chalkboard, too.
I've definitely fallen into this particular trap a few times, but I've learned to (mostly) avoid it by building in a lot of time for worked examples and the like. For a one-hour class, I rarely have more than about 15 slides in the file.
Julia: Some visuals are easier to present in one mode and some in another. Surely you wouldn't argue that trying to draw on a chalkboard sketches of the appearance of a newly discovered animal has just the same effect as showing the slides of clear original color photographs?
Sure.
But this, again, is something that a good speaker will deal with in an appropriate manner. If the talk will need to be conducted with nothing beyond a chalkboard, the talk should be prepared in a way that doesn't require something that can't be done well on a chalkboard.
I tend not to use PowerPoint for upper-level classes, because it's too much hassle to make the equations you need (though now that I have TeX4PPT, I might start trying to do more with it). When I do that, I find ways to present the information that don't require elaborate graphics, because I'm no great artist on a chalkboard. If I absolutely can't discuss something without showing a picture, I'll fire up the computer projectors just for that.
The relentless left-right linear nature of PowerPoint can get on some people's nerves, and the distracting movement plus the lower lighting too often required can distract from a feeling of personal contact with the speaker as well as make it harder for people to make notes of ideas/questions on issues they are especially interested in.
I don't think the lighting requirements are any different than for an overhead projector talk, which was the previous standard. I imagine that 35mm slide probably present the same problem.
Paul: Lectures can be a problem if, as mentioned above the file is avaliable online. However, my first Mechanics course last year got around this and made things a lot more interesting. We were given printouts of each lectures slides at the start, only with gaps left for equations, diagrams and certain key notes. We would have to fill these in as they were explained during the lecture. You ended up taking a lot of extra notes, and had time to take in the ideas as you were not scribbing down details as you went.
I've toyed with doing that, but it uses so much paper that I become paralyzed with liberal guilt.
I tend to state example problems in the lecture slides, and maybe put the numerical answers in at the bottom, but not show all the work. I work the problems out on the board in class, to encourage people to actually take notes.
Harlan: In my opinion, an excellent lecture class would have PP slides, would have several structured non-lecture sorts of activities to keep students from tuning out and let them interact with the material, and the hardware would include a tablet screen, so it's easy to scribble on the PP, fill in blanks, note interesting points from students, etc. That technological solution allows much more interactive PP talks...
A colleague of mine does that with a tablet PC, and says it's fantastic. I'm too cheap to buy a tablet for myself, so I've never tried it.
The problem of being locked into a particular script is a bigger one, and I do run into that on a regular basis. To some degree, it can be avoided by carefully structuring the presentation, but it's almost impossible to set things up so as to completely avoid somebody anticipating a later point.
I find, though, that I'm not a great deal more inclined to re-structure chalk talks on the fly than I am to jump ahead in a PowerPoint talk. I could just flip ahead a few pages, and start doing a different derivation, but for the most part, even when I'm lecturing with chalk, I tend to say something like "That's an excellent question, and I'll answer it in a few minutes."
mollishka:
But just as long as everyone agrees that chalkboards are vastly superior to those nasty whiteboards...
Actually, I strongly prefer whiteboards. I don't like having chalk dust on my hands, and I hate, hate, hate the sensation of writing with chalk on a chalkboard. I don't even like to write on paper with a pencil.
Give me ink or markers any day.
I actually prefer whiteboards, except for the fact that all of the bloody pens are already dead.
Re: some specifics above : Julia, you mention the lowered lighting. If you're mostly using high-contrast slides, you don't have to lower the lighting very much. In my class, I'm usually just using dark words and diagrams (of a few different colors) on front of a very light grey background. I lower the lights a little, but I can still easily see and recognize the faces of the students in the back of the room -- and I do answer questions fairly frequently. Indeed, I kind of like the class I have this year, becuase there are several (rather than the usual one or two) people who are comfortable asking questions. Indeed, I had one student suggest an ad hoc demonstration on Friday, for which I was quite grateful.
Re: people complaining about the use of a computer presentation, I've often heard just the opposite. I've had students in evaluations say "good use of PowerPoint" [sic] (it's not actually powerpoint). I generally consider that a very shallow comment -- isn't the content more important than how pretty the slides were? But it does indicate, I think, that at least for those students the computer slides were not getting in the way of understanding the content.
Harlan --
If you have a 300-person class, you may want to mostly be lecturing, but it's really important to allow interaction as well. Giving a class with PP requires the instructor to specifically design interactive activities (above and beyond "any questions?"). Writing on a whiteboard definitely encourages interaction more.
You do address this later in your comment, but I want to highlight one important point : interaction does not equal improvisation. Designing and planning ahead of time the interactive activities are essential to a good lecture, I think. Yes, you want to use your brain while you're in there so that you can direct them and adapt them based on how the class is doing, but they go so much better when planned ahead.
The interactive bits of my lectures fall into two categories. First, multiple choice questions I ask, and which students answer by holding up colored letter card ("analog clickers"). If the answers are mixed, I ask the students to discuss the question amongst themselves before answering again. Second, I use some "lecture tutorials," which are worksheet-type things that students do in pairs, while I wander around the room with my TA oftering nudging hints and answering questions. All of these things require planning ahead. The tutorials don't use the computer presentation, but the multiple choice questions do. (Look almost any of the lecture notes I have on my astronomy 102 site, and you'll see some of those questions.)
In a smaller class, I'll often spend 1 day a week just giving the students problems to work out, while I wander through the room observing how they're doing and talking with them how to do it. This is not based on the computer at all, and is also (in my observation) a valuable part of the course. Once there are more than 20 or so students, however, that mode of operation becomes impractical for more involved sorts of problems. Once again, though, this is something that requires a lot of planning ahead.
Improvisation always happens... but if you really want your class to be good and interactive, you've got to plan that like the rest of the lecture.
-Rob
Oops, forgot to close my bold. Chad, can you play editor for me? I know, I know, I'm supposed to preview, but I'm a lazy blog commenter. Fingers faster than brain, too much time typing and not enough time proofreading, all of that.
The only bit that's supposed to be bold is "interaction does not equal improvisation."
Chad -- it's interesting that you gave the same "slide limit" as I roughly did (about 15). I suspect this says as much about lecturing style as about the absolute rate of information. I've seen some slides that one can spend half an hour on, and some that one really can whip through at the rate of 1/minute.
-Rob
Chad -- it's interesting that you gave the same "slide limit" as I roughly did (about 15). I suspect this says as much about lecturing style as about the absolute rate of information. I've seen some slides that one can spend half an hour on, and some that one really can whip through at the rate of 1/minute.
It's very much an empirical limit. I've noticed that somewhere around 15 slides, I start to feel really rushed at the end of the period, and generally run five minutes over. If I'm making up a new lecture, and end up with more than 15 slides, I start to look really closely at the timing.
With fewer than 15 slides, I'm much more relaxed, and go five minutes over in a calm and leisurely manner.
"the lighting requirements are any different than for an overhead projector talk, which was the previous standard"
Actually, that framing is just what I was objecting to. As I pre-date the days when the overhead projector was a "standard," I've seen one technological mode after another become routine. In every case, the very routineness meant that many, many presentations were damaged rather than helped. The fact that a previous standard required annoying conditions doesn't make the present standard less annoying in the same conditions.
I went from films and chalkboards through various types of projections, and PowerPoint (with and without the improved lighting techniques), and whiteboards on the wall and on the computer, and in-class computer demonstrations (with each student at his/her own computer), and online teaching with visuals and sound and live chat, etc. I've seen every kind produce more bad presentations as it became a "standard" and therefore more routine. Routine modes of presenting visuals can become unpleasantly inapparopriate and distracting. I worry as soon as anyone begins to defend a mode without saying exactly what presentation and what purpose. With every presentation, we ought to be choosing carefully among the rich variety of aids available.
Hmm... It's all very well to say "don't blame your tools", but in the hands of a cook, a dull knife is still much more hazardous than a sharp one. (To the cook, that is!) Everything I've heard about it suggests that the problem with PowerPoint as a program, is that it's unreasonably hard to make it do what you want, as opposed to what the PowerPoint programmers wanted. That's a problem in itself, and it's worth considering alternative tools for computer-aided presentations.
Hmm. So it's just the tool, being badly used? Probably true in many cases. There are people who can't lecture worth a damn no matter what the format. I'm a pretty good lecturer, with or without .ppt, at least according to colleagues and students. So I'm the one who is blaming .ppt for lectuers I give I think could be a lot better if I spent more time on them. Not .ppt's fault? Yes, true.
But it's not just good presentations we don't teach our students. We push them through dissertations where essentially their main activity outside of TAing, etc., is to do their research. What we don't teach them is how to juggle a zillion different things at once, one of which is our research. Given the extent to which we are all stretched, .ppt makes it easy to get lazy in preparing lectures, and its format compels a particular kind of laziness. So, yes, if I weren't lazy about my lecturing (which I've done in all formats for 40 years) I might have better .ppt lectures. Or not. A tool does leave its traces on the product. But I have a zillion other things to do.
Like blog.
@19 : David Harmon
I agree with you entirely. PowerPoint is what it is, and it's no one above is wrong in identifying it as one tool among many. The problem is that it's a tool that's become institutionalized and regarded as The Way to do a talk or presentation. Given the oft-noted and much maligned problems with the software and the inflexibility of the slideshow metaphor, the combination is disastrous.
It's no better in the "real world" either. I've worked as a government contractor for over 4 years and have seen more mind numbingly boring presentations than I can count, all of them with a slideshow in the background. I'm not blaming PowerPoint per se, but the fact that it's absolutely standard (almost required) reinforces all the bad habits people have.
I'm gratified to see that Edward Tufte was mentioned in the very first reply here, because he's the first name I thought of too. I'm of the belief that he should be tought to every single science and engineering major (and, truthfully, anyone else who might someday present information in a group setting). "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is an absolute classic and has casued me to rethink some of my own bad habits. It's worth noting that he has a short pamphlet containing relevant excerpts from his books, called "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint". Read it. Learn it. Live it.
With fewer than 15 slides, I'm much more relaxed, and go five minutes over in a calm and leisurely manner.
Heh. In my class, it's hard to go five minutes over. The class starts rustling about three minutes before the hour, and I have to talk loudly and stay very focused to keem them paying any attention to me.
I routinely have more prepared than I will use; what that means is that some of what I was going to do gets pushed off until next time. That's probably fine, because by then it's usually either the introduction to a new topic we'll explore in more depth later, or it's questions to help the studnets test themselves on their understanding. Either way, a delay of a couple of days doesn't hurt. (And I'm paranoid about running out of stuff, so I often have extra prepared -- although I can usually estimate pretty well how much I'll get throug. There are always suprises.)
-Rob
is that it's unreasonably hard to make it do what you want, as opposed to what the PowerPoint programmers wanted.
That's not my experience at all. For me, the computer presentations provide me with a tool to do a lot of things that used to be more strenuous.
Again, I use OpenOffice Impress. But, first and foremost, I see it as a drawing program. And, myself, I find it easier, usually, to do decent diagrams and drawings on a computer than I do on a chalkboard. Text is more readable. Multiple choice quesitons with the answers out there don't take forever to write. (Indeed, in the "old overhead" days, if I had some sort of drawing or diagram I needed to do, it was usually via a computer drawing program and printed out on to an overhead!)
I use no transitions, and very few animations. (And the animations I use are silly -- I have a multiple choice question. Usually, after they've answered, the box around the correct answer just appears, but occasionally it flies in. That's about it.) All that stuff is generally overdone. But in terms of a medium that allows me to include the pictures and plots I need, that allows me to draw what I need, the computer presentation is something I've found far superior to anything I've done previously.
Also, I like having everything virtual as opposed to printed out on overheads. It makes mix-and-match easier later, and it makes it easier to make last-minute touch-ups and so forth.
Plus, I've got the web right there for when I need it, and (as sometimes happens depending on the demonstration) I have a spreadsheet or what-not available. Plus animations and movies. Plus Digital Universe (from the Hayden Planetarium).
It's a tool that can be poorly used, and certainly it can try to push you in one direction... but it's also a tool that in my case has made a whole lot of things easier and better.
Here's what I REALLY want in my computer presentations.
Gigantic screen. Ability to flip different parts of the screen at different times, or perhaps "push" a slide aside to one side of the gigantic screen so it remains available for reference even as I move on to other slides.
That is one of the main things that (in my view) big rolling/sliding blackboards have over computer presentations. You can write something and keep it there, and refer back to it as you're moving on to other things. With computer presentations as they are, you either must echo key points from one side to the next, or you must flip back and forth (which must be done carefully to be done well).
Once we've got giant screens and the easy ability to "shove aside" one slide to keep it there, I will be happy.
(Oh, and chocolate on demand, too.)
-Rob
A tool is 'just a tool', but it's still stupid to open a paint can with a chisel. Powerpoint is a business tool; its first purpose is not to explain, but to persuade.
Personally, I think my audience should be fixated either on me -- possibly argumentatively -- or on what they're writing -- possibly into a laptop, pity about the noise. I'm not any kind of fond of a lecture with the audience staring at a screen; why bother to assemble for that? Stare privately, talk during facetime.
The error that my slide-using profs are currently led into is cut-and-paste sloppiness about their symbols, which change meaning from slide to slide. Transparencies could have done that too; chalk and whiteboards, rarely.
I did have one professor who was much, much more energetic and engaging when the projector was broken and he had to draw his diagrams himself. It was also much more obvious that he knew what he was talking about. I'm willing to believe it's not common, though--I don't remember noticing that about any other professors.
I prefer chalk talks almost always, but it truly depends on the subject matter. I about killed my AV department when they assigned me a room without a computer system for 300-level developmental biology. There is no reason anymore to teach cortical rotation, gastrulation and similar 3D dynamic processes in chalk. I draw well, but no matter how well I draw, it's 2D, static and monochromatic. It's not the best way for the students to learn the material.
The students deserve subject-appropriate teaching tools. Sometimes powerpoint fills that need, sometimes it doesn't, it's just a medium. In my opinion, people who give bad powerpoint talks gave bad chalk talks and slide talks, and will in the future give bad holographic podcasts.
You have no doubt seen Tufte on Powerpoint:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic…
Middle school teacher so my view is a little different. I use powerpoint when I can, there's only one projector in my school so I have to sign up well in advance. I have three reasons for using it:
1. My writing is awful.
2. It gets expensive to print things out on an overhead.
3. It's middle school so I'm not always comfortable turning my back on the kids to write.
Some more Tufte:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00025o&topic…
This too is worth looking at:
http://armsandinfluence.typepad.com/armsandinfluence/2006/08/death_by_p…
And this classic:
The Gettysburg Address on PowerPoint
http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/
My feelings on PowerPoint lectures for students are mixed. I think that most theoretical lectures are better off done on a black/whiteboard, for the reason already pointed out in the article: it allows students to follow the reasoning, follow the calculations and, which I consider important, write them down. As a student, I noticed that I remember much more from the lectures on which I've been taking notes. Just sitting in the class doing nothing apart from listening to the teacher made me sleepy. Note-taking is an activity which allows someone to re-think the material at once. It's the same mechanism which makes it easier to perform calculations with pen and paper than in someone's head only.
On the other hand, I think that experimental lectures cannot avoid using slides. You simply cannot draw a schematic of the apparatus or an example experimental result chart on the black/whiteboard in a nice and clear manner. This must be prepared on a slide.
One mistake people (including many students) make about lecturing with PowerPoint in class is to assume that the slides serve as a replacement for in-class note-taking. They're not meant to be, and an important part of designing a good PowerPoint class lecture is to find ways to make sure that students still take their own notes. I make the slides available electronically as a supplement (so students can re-check diagrams and graphics and the like), not a replacement.
There's also absolutely no reason why a PowerPoint talk can't present equations to students in a comprehensible manner, and at a pace that they can follow. In fact, I'd go one step farther and say that any PowerPoint lecture that doesn't give students reasonable time to write down the relevant equations is badly done. If you're doing it right, students should get everything out of the lecture that they would from a chalk talk, with the bonus feature of having the equations presented in a clean and readable font.
The point about the PowerPoint defaults pushing you in the direction of a particular bad presentation style is a good one. I tend to forget that, because it's a Microsoft product-- all of their programs have horrifically stupid default settings. And make it needlessly difficult to change the default settings.
I've spent so much time overriding stupid defaults in Word and Excel that I never even considered taking PowerPoint's suggestions for how to construct a presentation. But yes, if you're not accustomed to the idea that Office defaults are always wrong, it pushes you in the direction of a certain type of bad presentation.
Finally, I have read at least some of Tufte's stuff on PowerPoint, and my initial reaction was pretty much the same as my reaction to The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: he's got some good points, but he goes a bit too far. The first half to two-thirds of the book are excellent, but he loses me when he starts advocating getting rid of most of the axes.
I'll take another look at the PowerPoint thing later (I have to deal with Her Majesty this morning, and then go make up PowerPoint slides for my lecture tomorrow), and see if I have anything more specific to say about it.
Me: is that it's unreasonably hard to make it do what you want, as opposed to what the PowerPoint programmers wanted.
Rob Knopp: That's not my experience at all. For me, the computer presentations provide me with a tool to do a lot of things that used to be more strenuous.
Again, I use OpenOffice Impress.
Which is to say, not Powerpoint per se. My point exactly.
Whoops, it's Rob who was saying he uses Impress. I could've sworn that close tag was after that line....
Note-taking is an activity which allows someone to re-think the material at once. It's the same mechanism which makes it easier to perform calculations with pen and paper than in someone's head only.
Indeed, this is true, when done well. In ages past when I used to take classes, I found that when I made "study sheets," the making of the sheet was the most useful part. (In my high school history classes, I used to make study sheets that had names and concepts on the left, and short descriptions on the right; I could use it as a flashcard sort of thing. Inevitably, some friends would copy it, and others would copy it from them, and it would get widely spread. People would ask me if I was angry that I had put so much work into making the sheet, and others were just using it for free. I didn't... I had realized that they weren't getting the full benefit of it!)
However, note-taking can also be mere transcription. I have sometimes heard the traditional lecture described as "the process of transcribing the professor's notes to the student's notes without them passing through the brains of either." Even in a chalk talk, if you're going at the rate you can write, the students can keep up with the writing and easily be lost. Indeed, one reason I don't want students to just transcribe things, especially verbose slides, is that they waste the whole time transcribing instead of thinking. (I give them some slides ahead of class, and post all of them afterwards, and make it clear I will do that.) The notes they should take should be the ones that help them understand it.
The simple act of note taking doesn't mean that useful thought is being applied. It's a skill to apply useful thought to lectures, and we never really teach it. If you really want the students to think actively about what they're doing, trusting it will happen from mere note-taking is chancy. It's better to design activities and questions and so forth that subvert the students into active thinking.
-Rob
I never even considered taking PowerPoint's suggestions for how to construct a presentation.
Yeah -- OpenOffice Impress comes with a million little "template" thingies that I've never even bothered looking at. Give me a blank slide as a drawing platform, and let me organize each slide in a manner that makes sense for that slide. The idea that every slide is going to have a "title box" with a "content box" below it (sometimes with an already-waiting bullet list in the "content box") is absurd for a science class, and is probably absurd in general.
It would be a very, very rare lecture where any kind of template-- even one I designed sanely myself-- would work for more than a small fraction of the slides. That goes for my colloquia as well as my talks. A blank slate and drawing tools is what I need.
-Rob
Julia, by definition those are bad talks. Irregardless of whether the person has designed visual aids for optimal information transmission, the fact that people were walking out of the room talking about the presentation and not the content means the speaker failed.
I gave a rehash on Monday of my thesis defense (two weeks ago) for a departmental seminar. The extra two weeks of editing/fiddling/thinking about what to say and how to say it made a huge difference. First thing I did, add in a proper acknowledgements slide as the very last slide so I could jump to it easily. Next, I took two algorithm slides and two background slides and redid them as five algorithm slides that take much less work to understand. I completely chucked a slide that took 20 minutes in the defense and turned out not to be particularly relevant, forcing me to go back and really puzzle through whether and how to present that point. I reformatted the talk and obsessively tested for failure modes at the resolution of the projector to be used: laptop is 1280x800, projector is 1024x768, so if you don't design with the laptop displaying 1024x768, your talk will misfire in places (and my defense did but the seminar did not). For a 50-minute talk, I ended up with 60 slides, one of acknowledgements, five of which were not needed but were useful just in case, one of which was a quick bulleted version of the paper abstract, and 11 of which were highlighted table of contents slides so that people could see how far into the talk we were. Now, normally that would be a preposterous number, but a tested and worked any slide that took more than a certain amount of time. I also repeated several equations when it was important, and each of these equations takes at least a 3rd of a slide. Figures: varying amounts of time, and I put them with no additional content so that people would be focused on a figure as I explained it. Background: some breezed through because it was interesting and possibly relevant but not critical, some more time devoted to.
As you can see, the issue ius never, and I mean never, the limitations of powerpoint. The issue is always, ALWAYS, talk design. A bad talk, irregardless of delivery mechanism, is because the person did not do the work of designed a good talk.
agm --
I agree with you completely, although I nearly did spit up when I read 60 slides for a 50 minute presentation....
However, I think the point is that (a) PowerPoint lets you eaisly put together something that looks "professional" and attractive, even if the content is crap, and (b) the culture of PowerPoint has spread misinformation about what a good talk is, so that people who are making bad talks think they are making good talks.
-Rob
The solution is clearly to use the "blackboard" background and font option in keynote...
Computer presentations provide much better figures and allow animation and sound, which can be important for a number of issues.
But, the information density is much lower on a slide; the pixel resolution is much lower than on a blackboard and the effective density of words and symbols is lower.
The Gettysburg address in powerpoint makes that point well.
Bullets are soooo tempting, but absolutely terrible when lecturing (as opposed to trying to convey key points in a short talk). They fragment the topic and reduce it to oversimplified sound bytes.
Ultimately what matters for learning, as opposed to teaching, is that the student assimilate the material in multiple ways, not just by passively listening and looking, in particular whatever way works for that student.
So they need to look, listen, read, write their own notes; and then do it all over again by reading (or listening) background material, looking over notes, and then rewriting the material again, including preferably their own summary.
Most students will not do this.
At best they will seize one of the multiple modes of learning and cling to it as a miracle method, occasionally they are even right, having found a narrow channel by which they learn and assimilate.
It is interesting how you stumble across things on the internet, completely by chance, which are extremely relavent to your current situation.
I am a physics major in my fourth year, and as part of my undergraduate thesis, at the end of November I have to give an interm report to the department (there will be coffee, tea, and cookies, bring your friends). At the moment I am planning exactly how I am going to do it.
I have been to a few years of these talks now, as well as a ton of other talks (it is a really small department, when someone gives a talk the profs make sure EVERYONE comes). In the past the standard fare has been to make a rather awkward presentation as the student throws equation after equation at the audience. At the end of it, the only person who understands exactly what the talk was about was the guiding prof.
With this in mind I am more or less ditching powerpoint for anything other than supporting content. I raided the library for any books by this guy, Ed Tufte and he makes a ton of good points, as well as gives some ideas for improving presentations.
First of all, I am going for handouts. I just attended a talk last thursday, and only one other person in the department was intimately familiar with what the grad student was talking about (his prof). It was really hard to get a handle on the implications of one slide before the next slide, which built on those implications, took its place.
A handout would mean that you could sort of cross reference past slides with the current slide and form a more coherent picture of what the presenter is talking about.
Since my subject has a ton of very pretty graphs, I intend on using powerpoint to display important graphs, animations, and equations. I am going to avoid reading off bullets projected on the screen at all costs.
Of course before I can get to work I have to solve some of the problems I am going to present ...
lecture n The process by which information is transferred from the notes of a professor to the notes of the students, without passing the brains of either.
This sarcastic definition unfortunately comes far too close to reality in way too many cases. I completely agree with the concept that no tool in itself will transform a bad talker into a good one. We don't expect people to be able to build a house if we give them a saw and a hammer but no training, and we certainly don't expect them them to become an architect and design the house!