PowerPoint Bad For Learning

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."

I saw a Powerpoint presentation on this!

[LibertineR]

So naturally its true!

Oh wait,.......

Please ask questions after my presentation

[TodMinuit]

Slide 1: TFA

• Their right
• They make good points
• They are smart

Slide 2: Cheese

• Tastes good
• Great with sandwiches
• Bad for you

Slide 3: Conclusion

• The article: Correct
• Cheese: Jury's still out

Thank you, I will now take questions from the audience.

Re:Who's at fault though?

[Hijacked Public]

Edward Tufte would like to have a word with you.

And not a Microsoft Word, an actual Word.

Re:I saw a Powerpoint presentation on this!

[darkitecture]

I saw a Powerpoint presentation on this! So naturally its true!

Are you sure? I wasn't paying attention...

Power corrupts. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.

--Edward Tufte

Did I read that right?

[willie_nelsons_pigta]

The University of NSFW...? ohh man now that was a powerpoint I wanted to see!

Re:Please ask questions after my presentation

[vertinox]

What is on their right? The cheese?

Re:Please ask questions after my presentation

[TodMinuit]

You ask an excellent question.

Next question please.

Re:Please ask questions after my presentation

[UbuntuDupe]

And this is how your actual presentation goes (spoken part in italics):

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 ... The ... "Farkin" Article.
-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 ... correct that later.
-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?

Powepoint? TeX and LaTeX were extremely bad

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Why are people cribbing about powerpoint being bad? I have seen people make these things called "papers". They download things like the style files from American Math Society or something and use some software created by Donal Knuth called TeX or by Leslie Lamport called LaTeX. Lots and lots of Greek and Latin and strange symbols and unreadable things. They are extremely bad and they dont communicate anything useful to me.

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.

Re:Who's at fault though?

[eck011219]

Yep. Waiting for twenty minutes while the presenter screws around trying to get the laptop to reboot (nervously joking about it the whole time) and THEN sitting through that jerk reading his slides verbatim.

Re:Who's at fault though?

[Hoi Polloi]

I've had university classes where the prof literally read from the book. I'd look at my notes and realize I'd just copied pages from my text book.

Re:Who's at fault though?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

You made 6 points in that post, violating your own rule 4. Did those people who were teaching you "how to effectively communicate using power point and extremely long course titles that specify all the course content inculding the final examn paper" have more than 4 points to make?

Re:Only on /.

[voice_of_all_reason]

Rarely is the question asked: "Is our users learning?"

Re:Please ask questions after my presentation

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

What is on their right? The cheese?

No, the cheese stands alone.

What we've suspected all along

[HangingChad]

This is your brain.

This is your brain on PowerPoi...what was the question again?

Is there a better way?

[brouski]

I prefer Steve Ballmer's method of interpretive dance.

Re:Who's at fault though?

[WatchTheTramCarPleas]

That sounds a lot like my software engineering "class"

Re:Please ask questions after my presentation

[NilObject]

Oh, you think you're so funny.

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.

Re:Who's at fault though?

[d3matt]

Sounds like you had the same professor I did...

Re:Who's at fault though?

[Lumpy]

you forgot.

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.

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation

[nbauman]

11/19/1863

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, here we go:

Click here to start

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/ [norvig.com]

Re:Much of PowerPoint banned in military 10 years

[robably]

I myself continue making presentations with the most difficult
but most thought-out of tools, LaTeX,
which is actually a mathematical book publishing tool.

And what crazy-ass software do you post to Slashdot with that formats your post like a teenage poem? It doesn't fill me with confidence that you're the right person to take presentation advice from, if you see what I mean.

Re:Who's at fault though?

[smittyoneeach]

Various instances of the same abstract(ed), (de)based class.

Research all they want

[cerberusss]

They can research all they want, but everyone knows how to make a powerpoint presentation *ahem* "memorable"...

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...

Re:Who's at fault though?

[qwijibo]

Wrong. Once you have relegated a topic to a powerpoint presentation, it is a money sink. It is impossible for any productive or profitable information to be conveyed via powerpoint. Possible topics for powerpoints:

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 into them was a bullet point on a powerpoint slide.

Powerpoint exists to give busywork to non-contributors. It keeps them out of the way of people doing real work. If you don't believe me, try firing all of the people whose primary job is to work on powerpoint presentations and see if the productivity of the organization sky rockets.

Re:I have always despised PowerPoint

[Convector]

That's a great method as long as you make certain to use local files. I saw one presentation where the presenter had posted his web presentation to his geocities account and ran it off there. Every time he advanced a "slide", an ad came up.

I can't read all of that...

[whorapedia.com]

Do you have a PPT of the article?

Re:Who's at fault though?

[nuzak]

No, there should be a different transition per bullet point, and they should take at least three seconds each. Make sure each level of bullet point is in a different font too.