Discussion: View Thread

From: Ken Friedman [mailto:ken.friedman@bi.no]
Norwegian School of Management

Friends,

The NYT article on PowerPoint caught my eye, too.

I am no fan of PowerPoint. It has uses, but these are
far too limited to make using it worth while in most
applications.

In the primary and secondary classroom, it is exactly
as useful as any of the many technical inventions that
we already use to develop student skills.

Analysis, rhetoric, and logic remain the foundation
skills that students require.

One of the great difficulties we face in college is the
challenge of helping students to develop basic thinking,
reading, and writing skills that they should have
developed before we accept them.

PowerPoint will not improve this situation.

--snip--

"When you get to high school, you will need a lot of PowerPoint," said
Nestor Mendoza, another student in Mr. Bennetti's class, "and in the real
world, too. This gives us time to practice."

--snip--

Any high school in which PowerPoint is more useful
than books is a school where teachers fail to meet
their responsibilities. The job of a teacher is neither to
lecture nor to train. It is to shape a learning environment
in which students grow from basic skills to advanced skills
by learning to think. by gathering information, and by
learning how to transform information into knowledge
by applying it to problems and developing solutions.

It is not clear that PowerPoint is more effective for
this than other tools. To the degree that PowerPoint
substitutes the appearance of polish for substantive
content, however, it is clear that misguided use of
PowerPoint can work against educational goals.

--snip--

Joan Vandervelde, a director of online professional development at the
University of Northern Iowa, said that she was offering courses this
summer to help teachers combat PowerPoint abuse.

PowerPoint's most pernicious quality, critics say, is its potential for
substituting presentation polish for thinking skills.

--snip--

In my own classroom -- and when I present elsewhere --
I do not use PowerPoint. I prefer a well organized talk
with lots of eye contact, followed by interaction and
dialogue.

The greatest value in a PowerPoint presentation is that
it facilitates the neatly designed handouts that some
speakers deliver afterwards.

As a presentation tool, it is overrated and overused.

At best, it supports and serves as a visual background to
a good presentation. Given the common use of defaults with
poor backgrounds, however -- dark-to-light shift in
which much of the type becomes illegible against
a background with too little differentiation -- PowerPoint
often works against otherwise good presentations.

At worst, however, PowerPoint is also a substitute
for the failure of scholars and business leaders to think
well and to present their thoughts cogently.

In all the PowerPoint presentations I have seen, only
two of several hundred stand out for the effective use
of PowerPoint to support and reinforce the intellectual
content of the presentation. They stood out precisely
because they were so uncommon. It was clear that
they required a level of image management, computer
work and audiovisual skill that is not justified
by most one-off presentations.

As an educational tool for the development of thinking
skills, I'd place PowerPoint somewhere ahead of glue
and construction paper and way behind books and
dialogue.

-- Ken Friedman

















--

Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management

School

+47 22.98.50.00 Telephone
+47 22.98.51.11 Telefax

Home office

+46 (46) 53.245 Telephone
+46 (46) 53.345 Telefax

email: ken.friedman@bi.no

Edryce Reynolds [edryce@juno.com]

Kudos to Ken Friedman for an eloquent and comprehensive analysis of
PowerPoint versus good facilitation by teachers. He said it much better
than I could. Thanks!

Edryce Reynolds
edryce@juno.com

From: Ruth H. Axelrod [mailto:raxelrod@gwu.edu]

Ken--

I second most of your concerns. We, too, are struggling to teach many
of our undergrads the basic writing skills that they should have learned
long ago. But we also need to teach them business writing--succinct and
content-loaded--and how to make oral presentations to groups. Learning
to make make PP presentations early in school--with bullit points--will,
hopefully, help with the latter, so I can't totally discount it's
educational potential. Why does it necessarily have to be devoid of
intellectual content? When used appropriately, it doesn't much differ
from speaking off notes on 3x5 cards, which is infinitely better than
reading a text. Most of the bad PP presentations you (and we all)
complain about are produced by people who have not learned to use the
medium, often because they are constitutionally uncomfortable with it.
So, from that standpoint, it's good that the primary/secondary ed system
is introducing them to it.

As we all know, nothing substitutes for reading good literature (and I
use that term broadly) and writing essays as a way of achieving a
command of the language, and I hate to see these activities slighted
(as, frankly, they are in most public schools.) But there's more to
communication than writing academic essays. Like any tool, PP can and
inevitably will be misused by mediocre teachers and disinterested
students as it is by mediocre presenters and inattentive audiences.
Nothing will ever change that. I don't think that the existence and use
of the tool per se is the problem.

Ruth
raxelrod@gwu.edu

From: Dan Eveleth [mailto:eveleth@uidaho.edu]

Powerpoint is better than glue and not as good as books? Is it proper
for us to rate the usefulness of our tools without a context or setting
to go with the ratings?

Ask any craftsperson which is the best tool in his or her tool box and
they will say "It depends upon what I am doing"

I would like to hear from those who have found Powerpoint to be a useful
tool. When do you find it most useful? Are there creative ways that it
is applied? How can it be used to enhance learning?
Thanks,
Dan Eveleth

From: GUILLEMETTE Jean-Marc [mailto:GUILLEMETJ@iata.org]


I do find PowerPoint a useful tool for learning, although I heartily agree
with all the caveats and precautions offered by other list members.

One of the features I like the most is the ability to use hyperlinks. This
allows me to build presentations that are not so linear. I can group slides
either by concept, idea, topic, etc. and move around as needed to support
the learning. For example, slides with additional information can be
prepared to further clarify a topic or concept. If things go smoothly and
participants are with me, I progress more sequentially from topic to topic.
If things get tough and participants don't follow (or to answer their
questions), I use hyperlinks to branch out to additional information and
return when done. This is very much the principle of branching in CBT
applied on a much smaller scale to the classroom.

In effect, hyperlinks allow me to combine a traditional presentation (slides
covered in sequence) with a knowledge map approach that is more adaptive to
student reactions. It takes a bit more time to prepare but links are sure
welcome when needed.

J-M. Guillemette
GUILLEMETJ@iata.org

From: Edryce Reynolds [mailto:edryce@juno.com]

Well, it is true that PowerPoint has its uses, but it cannot take the place
of a teacher/facilitator who knows how to get the students to take charge of
their own learning.

I would say that the proper use of PowerPoint is when the students use it to
give presentations to the class, not when the teacher uses it. I don't know
how many "lovely" presentations I have created, only to find out later that
most students didn't learn much. But when THEY create a presentation, then
THEY wonder why everyone doesn't know what they know!

Edryce

From: Edward Hampton [mailto:ehampton@mail.ucf.edu]

Here! Here!

Kind wishes.

Ed
Drive On!

----original message----------

Kudos to Ken Friedman for an eloquent and comprehensive analysis of
PowerPoint versus good facilitation by teachers. He said it much better
than I could. Thanks!

Edryce Reynolds
edryce@juno.com