Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.

[Hannah Bell]

Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication...

Yet slideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year... The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch...



PowerPoint's pushy style seeks to set up a speaker's dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin...?

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html

[bengalherder]

1. Dunno about that.

My kid did some brilliant power point presentations at his school (which I was invited to see). The best one he did was about the Cultural Revolution in China where he juxtaposed photos of real events with the colorful communist propaganda. He wove this in with a narrative constructed from interviews he had done with local survivors of the era. Not at all cut and dried like the article suggests.

Powerpoint is just a tool, and some use proabaly use it far better than others. Just because some people use it to hurl propaganda and false numbers certainly doesn't mean that everyone does.

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

I dunno how they did it in other schools, but my kid had to research, write and present an entire paper as well as assemble the presentation. This writer's love of generalities and apparent lack of love for powerpoint certainly leap off the page.

[Hannah Bell]

2. i liked the title.

[JackRiddler]

9. I understand why. Who can resist such a title?

[Gman]

3. Great title!

I've said since Powerpoint first came out that if one has all this time to put together this dazzling PPT presentation that he/she has entirely too much time on their hands and needs more work.

[MrModerate]

4. It's just a tool, like many others, that puts graphics previously restricted to professionals...

In the hands of anyone with a computer. It also fosters an approach -- validated by psychologists and educators -- that calls for information to be "chunked" in small, discrete segments to ensure the audience can grasp it.

Is it the right tool for all communications? Of course not (see Challenger Disaster; Churchill, Winston). But it provides a framework and guidance for (mostly corporate) presentations that would otherwise be garbled, inefficient, and likely to fail.

Can it be misused? Of course (see Edward Tufte, among others). But I'd blame the craftsman before the tools.

[LeftishBrit]

5. Surely you could say the same about blackboards?

It all depends how they're used!

[Javaman]

8. What is this blackboard that you speak of?

Right on the mark.

it's as if using a power point presentation over a blackboard suddenly makes the presenter "more informed".

Power points, in my opinion, should be used as a tool to start discussions no regurgitate BS.

[LeftishBrit]

15. I am old enough...

to remember when the Person in Authority In Front of the Room - whether teacher, lecturer, or conference speaker - used a blackboard and chalk.

Some encouraged discussion and independent thought; some demanded unthinking copying of whatever was on the blackboard. Some regurgitated BS and encouraged its regurgitation; some were stimulating and thoughtful. It's the same with powerpoint.

Conservative educationalists of the recent past recommended going back from 'child-centered methods' to what they called 'chalk and talk' - where the teacher was solely in charge and pupils were expected to sit listening and taking notes, rather than experimenting for themselves or engaging in discussions. Nowadays, it's powerpoint that can serve the same role. (And there is a role for chalk-and-talk - or powerpoint-and-talk - but it should not be the sole method.)

What is important is the attitude and approach of the speaker, not the precise form of technology that they use.

[Javaman]

17. I know what you mean...

the best classes I had in high school and college were ones where the teacher or professor wrote one word on the board and it would spark discussion for the rest of the class.

Chalk point discussions. LOL

[JackRiddler]

16. Not at all.

A standard blackboard (not the big sliding university ones) allows you to have no more than one "slide" prepared on it. Whatever else you put on it is usually the active recreation (and live performance) of your thinking, not some congealed talking points camouflaged by pictographics. You have to be awake, and that makes a big difference. There is also no back button.

[PCIntern]

6. The problem which I have with Powerpoint's users

is that they often just read from the slides in a predictable, boring manner, rather than using the tool as a springboard for speaking to the subject at hand. since many folks hand out papers which have the slides (in my profession), there's no need to listen to these people read...

Makes for a looooong afternoon or morning....

[Javaman]

7. My basic problem with power point presentations...

The presenter puts the slide up, then just repeats what's on the slide. That completely defeats the whole point of a power point.

A power point is supposed to have bulleted notes and for the speaker to elaborate on those points.

Just putting bullshit up on a screen for everyone to "follow along" teaches nothing and informs no one.

I call power points the lazy presenters copout.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

10. Another "Death By PowerPoint" rant.

Before PPT there were slide projectors and flip charts doing the same thing. And sometimes, they sucked.
Used correctly and where appropriate, PPT can keep an audience focused and can be great for managing data and even support media like embedded video clips. I've seen it used well in conjunction with things like student response systems and even 2-way video calls.
If someone's a bad presenter, we shouldn't blame the tool.

[mainer]

11. I agree completely! I stopped using it.

I found out that it draws attention from the message you're trying to get across. As a speaker, you're better off just giving your message -- not trying to disguise it with fancy images.

[MadHound]

12. It's like any other tool,

There are ways to use it correctly, there are ways to use it incorrectly, and there are times when it shouldn't be used at all.

It isn't the tool itself, it is the fact that far too many people use PP either incorrectly, or when they shouldn't use it at all.

[Joe Fields]

13. You really lack objectivity.

[JackRiddler]

18. You lack that, and manners.

[Fleshdancer]

14. As someone who uses ppt regularly, this breaks my heart

I've seen really bad presentations, but I've also seen amazing work that made boring or "heavy" subjects come alive.

Slideshare does awards every year, but this 2008 winner is still my favorite: http://www.slideshare.net/jbrenman/thirst