Why Learning from PowerPoint Lectures is Frustrating

I don't know. I've had some great lecturers deliver stuff via PowerPoint, and because I wasn't concentrating on dotting the is and crossing the ts of the equations, I could make copious notes around them and truly absorb them. My experiences learning from maths professors with terrible handwriting on OHPs (oh yes! there was a world before PPT!) were universally terrible, so perhaps I'm biased. Watching e.g. the Game Theory 101 lectures from Yale online makes me realise some lecturers actually seem to engage with written material...

I tended to take separate notes on paper alongside the slides and annotate slides, to get over the active learning go-to-sleep problem. Also, a bonus of bad lecturers and Powerpoint handouts is you don't need to turn up once you've sussed the first lecture.

One course that worked quite well for me had a handbook (so no scribbling, but no falling asleep) and the lecturer used very little in the way of visual aids. I wonder if that goes hand in hand with him being the best lecturer I had in terms of engagement and charisma...

Yes, yes, a million times yes. I'm an avowed chalkboard lecturer, for all the reasons the poster mentions in her essay, and also because it lets me engage the students to a much greater degree. I can elicit responses or even whole examples from the class and then run with them. I'm not constrained to a linear progression of events (as with a slide-based lecture) and can digress as appropriate. I have on occasion presented topics a full week or two early just because a student asked a reasonable question that motivated the topic---and because I was working with a chalkboard, I just ran with it and shuffled everything else around to compensate. Plus, it frees up the projector for other things, like the Java API reference or an open IDE to test something out.

I agree 100%! I think the best classes that I have taken have been the ones where the professor can digress on the topics and give you a deeper understanding for the topic. I had an older OS professor who would go off on tangents about the companies and people who had an impact on the early Operating Systems, which has been one of the most intriguing classes I have taken.

I agree that professor seem scripted when they rely on powerpoint slides. Also, I have noticed that professors are relying more and more on the slides from the book, which tend just to be a bulleted version of the book.

Death by powerpoint!

Hm, I have never made much notes (mostly none), from my point of view, lectures are useful to get a rough idea about the subject, or "what should I really learn", and then there are textbooks, monographs and other sources to study thoroughly (alone). OK, mostly I wouldn't visit the lecture anyway, as it tends to be either boring or crowded, and so on. Powerpointesque presentation for the lectures are useful as a list of the topics mentioned in the lecture.

My worst experience in college was Machine Learning. The professor taught the class by reading a series of sparse power point slides. There wasn't a book for the class, nor were we given other notes. There doesn't seem to be a vast amount of knowledge on machine learning as with some other topics, say calculus.

This is more of a problem with bad professors than with PowerPoint. I have had professors who were absolutely horrible teachers and used only the board, and excellent profs who used PowerPoint (well, come to think of it, AppleWorks and LaTeX, so maybe there is a problem with PowerPoint after all :).