It took a while to get here. Kenneth Green's comments about overhead projectors taking 20 years to get from bowling alleys into classrooms applies even more to PowerPoint. But now, PowerPoint slide presentations are being used by students and faculty alike with a vengeance. Are they being over-used or are they being used without a lot of thought? An increasing chorus of voices argue both of these points. Perhaps the best known and authoritative of these is Edward Tufte,1 who has achieved considerable success in critiquing the visual display of information. In an at times hilarious recently released pamphlet entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,2 Tufte rails against the way that PowerPoint gets in the way of the accurate presentation of information.3 Tufte pulls his examples from a range of different sources including graphs showing the causes of the Columbia shuttle disaster. His point is that PowerPoint imposes a certain style of presentation (and thought), which obscures the effective communication of concepts, facts and statistics. Tufte also includes as an illustration Peter Norvig's version of the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint.4 Another stinging critique appeared in the New Yorker in May 2001. In a piece entitled "Absolute PowerPoint," Ian Parker calls PowerPoint "software you impose on other people" but which also has a more sinister "interior influence." This is because PowerPoint (and the way it is used) edits the way the user thinks and organizes information. Parker describes how some companies have strengthened the already binding strictures in the software. He quotes one computer manufacturer as having its staff follow the "rule of seven," where each slide must have 7 bullet points and each line only seven words. Parker acknowledges that PowerPoint can add to presentations and even refers to linguistics guru Steven Pinker, who argues that it can add multidimensionality to presentations and thus aid the description and transmission of ideas. But ultimately PowerPoint is about content and moving information, often in very redundant sorts of ways. In addition to being built on a certain model of information movement (and thus constraining other types of thought and communication), PowerPoint presentations also take up a lot of space. In 1997 Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems banned PowerPoint at the company, in part because it was clogging up bandwidth (Parker 2001) But among the critique one can also find some excellent words of advice about how best to deal with and get around the strictures of the program.5 One of these is Doc Searls, who advises us to:6
He also advises that you should remember that presentations don't end with the construction of the slide show. When presenting, remember the following things:
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Notes
1
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
2 http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp
3 With some intentional irony Aaron Swartz has
created a powerpoint outline of Tufte's essay, see http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000931.
4 http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm
5 More advice can be found in the piece "Understanding
PowerPoint" by Dan Brown at
and Seth Godin's "Really
Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it)."
6 http://www.searls.com/present.html