PowerPointless: Digital slideshows are the scourge of higher education
slate.com
slate.com
No, it would not. Making useless work where none is needed is wrong, so there is no reason to artificially constrain students to being present. If a student is able to learn perfectly from a textbook and notes and other resources, or better yet, a video recording of the lecture, and is able to pass the tests and do the homework to prove they are indeed learning successfully, then there is no problem.
If you have to force students to attend lectures for the sole purpose of justifying the existence of your job, then your job should not exist.
We need both formats.
The medium is the message, if the medium is slides plus presenter, the lecture needs to be recorded.
We are at this amazing point in history where the avenues for communication currently outstrip our ability to use them. We should all be finding ways to fill that gap.
The slideshow should act as a visual aid to great teaching, rather than trying to replace it. I liked the idea that the slideshow alone should be nonsensical.
TL;DR: If you are making a slide-deck for an in-person presentation and also expect it to be a stand-in for you in your absence, then you are doing it wrong!
Is there a place between text notes for people who learn from text and live lectures for people who need interaction that is best filled with a video? Are there actually people in that place?
Neither does it provide the interaction of a live event nor the depth and individual pacing of the written word.
BEST CLASS EVER. I went to almost all of the lectures, but when I got home the video was usually already online - so if I missed something during the lecture, no worries, I could go back and rewatch it. IT WAS AWESOME.
Slides are terrible though - the problem is that it takes forever to make really good slides. I've seen it done before, and when it's done right it's a real piece of art, but 99% of the time slides are copied/made in haste and then the teacher just reads them off in class too quickly.
The only plus side to slides is you don't have to read the teacher's awful writing that is usually too small on a board that's too small for the giant room.
If I'd had videos, I could have watched them at 2x, paused when I needed to to go do some sketching or googling, and learned more in the same amount of time because I was directing my own learning and not limited to somebody else's linear encoding of ideas into words.
I could come up with a plausible scenario where everytime I try to learn from videos, pause and google something - I constantly receive mis-information and half-truths which confuse me further and cause me to google more random things. In this case I need to attend lectures so that I can interact with an established expert on the topic and ask questions 'live'.
The instructor-expert can add flavour and understanding to the slides, and expound upon the points being made, but the slides should also stand alone as a resource.
A lecturer should appreciate that it's impossible to absorb a complex topic during a lecture, and provide resources that later complement what they are saying.
No. that's the point. Slides have one purpose only - to help the student during the talk. Attempting to make them dual-purpose, namely....
>Students generally do refer to slides after lectures,
Is to end up with the worst of both worlds. If the lecturer wants to distribute notes or a transcript after the lecture, that'a what they should do.
> but the slides should also stand alone as a resource.
Nope
A lecturer should appreciate that it's impossible to absorb a complex topic during a lecture, and provide resources that later complement what they are saying.
> yes - just not in the for, of slides.
It's a difficult task to make one set to an adequate standard, so I was assuming you would use one set for both jobs (as seems to be the case in higher ed courses I'm familiar with).
Andrew Ng's Machine Learning lecture notes are world famous.
I feel like this lecturer is recognising that lecturers appear to add more value if they deliberately hinder students from accessing resources outside of their lectures. That's not a good thing.
All the conclusions seem bad if you set learning as the goal: I disagreed with the suggestions that the slides shouldn't make sense and that students shouldn't be able to read ahead.
If the students are reading ahead, they are better able to interact with the material ahead. That's a good thing.
The goal of the teacher is to help the students learn the subject matter: it's not right to think that they can only do that by paying close attention to your every entertaining word at the time you elect to say it.
When I held the course for Infosec 101, I made sure that everyone on the course knew two things on the first day:
1) slideware was NOT the study material, they were complementing the lectures and acted only as memory aids
2) the exam was deliberately designed and scored so that it could not be passed by merely trying to learn from the slideware
That gave the students two options. Either attend the lectures and read up on some of the external course material, or try to read all of the listed material and figure out what I'm going to emphasise in the exam. Most of them decided to attend. It probably helped that I was happily cultivating the legend of me being completely loose cannon and able to pull off pretty much any kind of stunt if it helped to make the material more memorable.
It worked too.
Or you could have just sent out an email stating what would be emphasized on the exam.
My goal was to actively discourage all kinds of rote learning, and require real understanding instead.
Confusing the two roles is the main problem with PowerPoints today.
If you doubt that students need help to avoid poor choices, consider how common cheating is, and how much effort we put into making it less rewarding for them.
It's a fact that if you put all the class notes online, some students will not come to class, thus you did not do them a favour.
Young whippersnappers don't seem to know how to take notes--so going with no slides is tough. Students cannot go back and review the lecture to make sure they understood key points. I'll use this method for teaching skills--e.g. calculating NPV in Excel--but not for introducing terms & definitions.
When I've used minimalist slides, I get a bunch of students complaining that there isn't enough detail. I think the lectures are more entertaining and engaging, personally, but for students who want to be able to review the material in preparation for an exam, minimalist slides aren't the best. Think about your average Discovery channel show. The shows are interesting and engaging, but if you had to explain everything to a friend later on, or had to take an exam on the material presented, how would you do? Without watching the whole thing over again, it would be hard to absorb all of the material.
I hate delivering the text-heavy slides to classes--I often want to skip over some points based on the flow of the lesson, but the doing so might cause confusion later on. Students will ask if they have to know that stuff for the exam.
Anyway, they key takeaway for me is to listen to the students and adjust to what they prefer, but not to ignore well-studied pedagogical best practices.
Hand-outs are great for mind-drifting students who are too lazy to take extensive notes but are nevertheless genuinely interested in the subject :)
Have you thought about getting rid of exams? Honest question.
I had a few progressive professors in college that completely ditched exams and went with either in person exams (think office hours with PG) or all participation and projects. I learned more from those classes than any class I took in all 4 years.
I know this style doesn't lend itself useful to all subjects but I feel that the academic community needs a massive overhaul in how it tests knowledge retention.
If you're going to go to the effort of planning a verbal (i.e. text) lecture, and then re-encoding it as slideshow, all for the purpose of getting students something to review... why not just write down your plan for the lecture--a transcript of what you're going to say--and then email it to the students?
In fact, ideally, do this before the lecture. That way, many of the students will have already read through it once, and will be able to ask more thoughtful questions.
Writing an approximate script of the lecture will aid in preparation, and then pairing it down into slides will help you find the beats you want to emphasize.
At the end, you'll be left with an improved presentation, and good material to distribute to students who miss the presentation.
The original presentation was in fact pretty comprehensible, but it was about presentations (and thus relied upon all the cheesy cliche accoutrement of presentation software), and done with the shortcomings of the medium in mind.
"many" is an overestimate.
You haven't taught before, have you? :) I'm only slightly kidding. I would love to have students engage with the material before class. I typically assign readings that introduce key concepts, then cover those concepts from a different angle in class to give students an incentive to 1) read before class, and 2) actually show up to class. Based on scores from ridiculously easy pop quizzes about the readings, its seems that a minority of students do even the assigned readings; I doubt many but a select few would review an entire transcript of a class before attending.
But it's something worth trying, at least, so thank you for the suggestion.
I'm a teacher. This is one of the interesting decisions that goes into preparing lessons well. You want to plan well enough that you know what you are going to present, but not so well that it's all rote. Leaving room for yourself to make mistakes in front of students is really good.
I tell my students as often as I can, "Professional mathematicians, scientists, and programmers make mistakes all day, every day. They have just trained themselves to expect mistakes, and know how to deal with them when they arise."
I also tell students that if they are not making mistakes most days, they are not doing interesting or challenging enough work.
A straightforward lecture delivered directly from a powerpoint is not automatically a bad thing. I think students sometimes over-estimate their ability to learn from reading slides and incorrectly assume that simply reading a powerpoint is equivalent to attending a class, even one where the slides are simply read aloud (which, yes, the OP alludes to in a different context). This seems silly, but actually hearing the words may help you understand and more importantly-- remember. I can't tell you how many times where my recollection of some important concept came back to me in a verbal manner, sometimes in the teacher's voice with the same inflection and cadence. (For a simple example from high school, alluded to in the slate piece: "the tangent is the opposite over adjacent." After hearing the teacher say that half a dozen times, I can't think "tangent is adjacent over opposite" without feeling is wrong.)
Obviously, if 100% of a class period is spent simply reciting bullet points from a slideshow, that may indicate a problem in the design of the course. But it's not unreasonable for some percentage of time to be devoted to lecture, however unoriginal the visual aides for the lecture might be. When I was in school, professors diligently copied notes from their own notebook onto the blackboard or overhead projector. It wasn't a huge difference really.
And yes there's a difference between students giving presentations and teachers giving presentations. Students see the presentation as the goal, the work that's going to get graded, something they have to do. Professors give lectures routinely as part of a lengthy course of instruction. Those are totally different scenarios and it doesn't make you a hypocrite to use slides while advising students to avoid them.
I'm betting you have a higher score on the auditory dimension than the general population.
Others may have a different 'centre of gravity' in their preferred sensory modes. Teachers should try to cater for all as far as possible (the sensory modes are not mutually exclusive)
It might not be bad in itself and if you do it right it can be as good or better than a presentation without the material that is read aloud. But at the same time you are wasting the potential of a presentation that is solely meant to help the attendee/listener along and to drive home the important points or even to just use it as a rhetoric device.
As an extreme example, look at this presentation: http://youtu.be/taaEzHI9xyY [1]. Most of the time his slides do not even contain a summary of what he talks about but just the headline or the punchline. And I find his style very refreshing.
If you really want to have stuff that you want your listeners to be able to work through at home, something which contains all important aspects, then just publish lecture notes online.[2]
[1] He begins his talk with some more conversational stuff but later on (skip to 18:30) he also features more technical stuff, and there his presentation is more interesting for our discussion.
[2] I see myself making this point the third time in the discussion of the article and I'm somewhat surprised that it's not completely obvious.
One of the best presentations I have attended was 90 minutes of stock photos. Each one was loosely connected to the next point that was to be made.
A couple of weeks ago I made a presentation where absolutely every bit of text said the exact opposite of what I was actually saying to the class. I was half way through the lesson before someone noticed. It got their attention though.
Slides are there to stop your class falling asleep, serve as a mind-jogger for yourself, and supply those rare bits of information that absolutely have to be visual, such as a graph or diagram. None of these things need text (except maybe the title).
Were you halfway through before someone noticed or halfway through before someone decided to say something about it?
Also, your experiment to make a presentation with opposite slides probably confused a lot of people in the audience before someone "noticed". Nice trick to get their attention but did they learn any better?
In less complex subjects I would prefer slides and well written lecture notes. What Rebecca Schuman is criticising are slides that are simultaneously abused as lecture notes.
[1] http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
[2] http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
When I give a public presentation, I use a whiteboard and marker, or a blackboard and chalk. If I were in a really large auditorium, I would use an old-fashioned overhead project with blank transparency sheets that I would hand draw on as I speak. I want my talks to be interactive and audience-responsive, not canned. (I do tend to prepare bullet-point outlines with references on a page or two of paper before I give a talk, and email that out afterward, but I say more than I what I write down, and I respond to audience questions.)
AFTER EDIT (TO ADD ANOTHER THOUGHT):
Just last evening I was at a presentation for parents, at which I was presenting with permanent market on paper pads on an easel, and during discussion a parent mentioned that she has her son open-enrolled in the half-day kindergarten program in my local school district. The kindergarten classes largely use smart boards run by the teacher's computer for instruction, so the little pupils (sixteen in her son's classroom) see a lot of slide shows. The other day, the teacher was telling the class about apples, and rather than bring an actual apple into the classroom, the teacher showed a slide of a stock drawing of an apple. (Apples are available year-round in any grocery store in my town, and cost a lot less than a smart board.) Would you want your children to have this kind of education in early childhood? Wouldn't it produce a deeper understanding of apples and how they grow to touch and cut open an apple while in a school unit about apples? (My school district has a paraprofessional teacher aide in each classroom along with the certified teacher for kindergarten and early elementary classes, so there should be sufficient adults in the room to let pupils touch and see actual apples during class.) This seems like PowerPoint gone mad in primary education.
Neither point addresses Tufte's central problem with PowerPoint, which is that the software, with its templates and bullet-point lists, encourages a certain style of ritualistic presentation, where the presenter's conclusions are the focus, not the backing evidence that leads to those conclusions. This sort of problem preceded PowerPoint (Tufte writes about similar problems with overhead projector presentations with transparencies filled with bullet points at IBM in his essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint), but PowerPoint inflamed the problem.
I really enjoyed doing it that way for once. My handwriting may have harmed the actual content, though :/
The Public Speaking: Should be a few words, a picture, a quote...basically what this presentation advocates for. Very minimalist. The focus should be on what the presenter is saying.
The Pitch Deck: In my opinion, a startup pitch deck should be very minimalist, but should be enough for someone to understand the pitch. Often investors ask me for pitch decks before a meeting. If there's only 3 words per slide, lots of valuable content might be missed. I still never have more than 3 bullet points per slide.
The Consulting Deck: When I worked for a big 3 management consulting firm, we used decks to present all of our information. It was much more technical and in depth, and it needed to stand alone in case a CEO wanted to read the study two years down the line. Many times it would have multiple graphs or infographics, and several bullet points. The top right would have a tracker saying which part of the presentation we were in, and the title would be a tagline which states the takeaway from the slide. This type of deck would never be presented to a large public audience, but rather around a table with a few stakeholders with in-depth subject matter knowledge.
Clearly there are different types of powerpoints for different situations. My best professors did notes by hand, rather than try to put everything on a powerpoint.
The most important rule that holds true to all Powerpoints, in my humble opinion, is one point/takeaway per slide.
Too many people use powerpoints as a crutch rather than a tool, and it gives the slideshow a bad name.
This year my dad, a football coach, lugged an overhead projector with a bucket full of transparencies and visa-vis markers to a football clinic he was asked to speak at. When the younger coaches saw the ancient contraption, word got out on twitter, and my dad was past capacity for his talk. Many of the youngest coaches had never even seen an overhead projector!
By the time his talk was over, he had drawn (we might say derived) his ideas right in front of them, adapting to the questions that came his way. Most people said they really enjoyed the more interactive style my father taught in contrast to the stale power points of some other presenters. A great reminder that some people (including me!) learn best when things are derived in front of them with a dynamic teacher.
Students are often given the digital slides which they use to study off of for finals.
The act of writing/taking notes does help some in knowledge retention. Note taking doesn't happen when students have access to the slides.
But, really, power points aren't the issue with higher education (or education in general).
The purpose of classes are to enable learning. This seems to be best done through student involvement. Lecturing really isn't a good way to get students involved.
I assume that is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but still.. is it really necessary?
"PowerPoint presents an amazing opportunity. You can use the screen to talk emotionally to the audience’s right brain (through their eyes), and your words can go through the audience’s ears to talk to their left brain.
That’s what Stephen Spielberg does. It seems to work for him."
I was amazed to find out that they knew about it but they were like "what?! that thing is totally WRONG" or "it's to unstructured to send any clear message" or "is the epitome of BAD DESIGN" etc. And later heard similar thoughts from business people that tried it, like "yeah, that's even worse than keynote" or "couldn't get anything done with that".
So I still wonder: why do lots of business/"creative-business" people find Prezi such a bad idea and some even call it "worse than powerpoint"?! (...to me it seemed like a really big step forward in the presentation world)
You can start with a mind-map and then use it to actually tell a story, and have a glimpse at the mind map as an outline every time you "walk" the map. With links between "map regions" you can also more-easily have a non-linear flow that the speaker can improvise "on the spot" instead of having to follow a linear structure.
Yeah, the speaker needs to be a good story teller, not to just go from slide to slide like a mindless robot, but all good story tellers have "maps" in their heads, not "slides", so you have a tool that is much closer to the mental model of the speaker. The "visual detail" of how Prezi can move from slide to slide means a lot to visual thinkers.
...now I guess my answer is that most people doing business presentations just don't think very visually at all, they are mostly "words persons", and instead of a map in their heads, they have a list of bullet points that they need to sell in their heads :(
I've never seen a Prezi presentation where the Prezi stuff wasn't a bunch of whiz-bang that distracted from the message, rather than adding clarity.
In some of them, the presenter baked all these weird Prezi transitions into their presentation and would actually pause speaking while things were spinning and zooming around on the screen, so we could all admire this stuff Prezi was doing.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
"the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis."
Needless to say i got a little talking to from my professor about how I should've had a powerpoint even though he got what i was explaining.
I received a slightly lower grade than a slew of people who just implemented some common algorithm & made a powerpoint about their wonderful journey (almost a direct analogue of the few paragraphs of the text that drove their ingenious work), even though I had spent all of my time you know... researching & experimenting with a novel algorithm.
It was at that point that I realized that even the highest echelons of academia can be a trough of mediocrity & conservatism.
being in a society that dictates super-linear patterns of thought/communication is a bummer for people whose minds don't work like that but still produce satisfactory (& often beyond) results
Could this not have been presented better with a few paragraphs of text on an otherwise blank page?
(seriously.. TL;DR anyone?)
I've seen exceptional presentations that stand on their own as documents to learn from; these are very valuable.
Nobody likes having a presentation read to them. This does not mean that we should make "slideshows" useless to force presenters into a different style. What the presenter says or does is ephemeral; the slideshow document lasts.
Point taken, sir.
Couple that with strong visuals and carefully rehearsed speaking — that's the way to teach and present.
On the other hand it got the message across well, in fact better than most slideshows.