Sunday, November 23, 2003

Is Powerpoint evil?

I'm a "professional Powerpoint user" <shudder> in that I use it everyday for presenting slides during lectures. I don't think Powerpoint is evil per se (although it can obviously be put to "evil" [stupid, pointless, inappropriate, misleading] purposes!) I can sympathise with the tone of Jeremy Zawodny's recent post about Powerpoint and agree with many of the comments but I disagree with 2 of his points: Zawodny says it's among mankind's worst inventions, which seems to leave out a lot of truly heinous things (religion? other ways of abrogating personal responsibility? UK fast food?) and as for the largest single source of useless crap within companies admittedly I've worked for just one "real" company (hearsay suggests it's similar in many other corporations) but there I felt that the useless crap tended to come from management, totally divorced from the everyday running of the company (oh so true Dilbert!)

Charles Eicher's old post on the subject is nearer my view -- Powerpoint is too limited to present complex ideas on its own (it is the speaker's comments that provide the detail.) Fortunately my students are also (in the main) too limited to understand complex ideas without the repetition that Powerpoint makes easy (OK, some of 'em are like that -- the majority don't turn up for class [duh] & a majority of the minority who do turn up are more switched-on than that sentence gives 'em credit for.) Links to other entertaining Powerpoint commentaries include the very interesting Avoiding Powerpoint suckage, Are we wasting $250M/day? (Humour: The Gettysburg Powerpoint Address).

As for Powerpoint online NO! I really loathe Powerpoint's exported slideshows! I do publish PDF versions of my slides online. My PDF slides are in two forms: One for students to print out and use in the lecture (6 slides to a page) and the other (1 slide to a page) for me & they to use for reference. We have a "Learning Management System" (Blackboard) on which the majority of material safely resides away from the wider web but it's painful to link to slides on Bb; having slides at a more static URL on a public web server is much more useful.

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