| Enough already with Powerpoint - just talk with me! | | Date Created: 15 Nov, 2004, 05:07 AM |
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"... in the winter of 1813 & '14, during my first College vacations, I attended a mathematical school kept in Boston by the Rev. Francis Xavier Brosius . . . On entering his room, we were struck at the appearance of an ample Black Board suspended on the wall, with lumps of chalk on a ledge below, and cloths hanging at either side. I had never heard of such a thing before. There it was - forty-two years ago - that I first saw what now I trust is considered indispensable in every school - the Black Board -and there that I first witnessed the process of analytical and inductive teaching." [May 1855] (Source: http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9537)
I am taking time out from writing my final essay for my Knowledge Management course at the university to compose this entry. The essay is a form of reflective journal supposedly helpful to my thinking how my studies have impacted my corporate life. Since I don't have a corporate life, being in independent practice, it will be a much more personal knowledge management journal I'll deliver.
While I was cruising the web (isn't "surfing" so passé by now) I located some software for Windows which is supposedly best of breed. Having duly installed it on Windows 2000 in Virtual PC 6, it of course crashed Windows the first time, and I finally got it to boot the second. Kept getting visual basic reminders to pay for the darn thing even though it was a 15-day demo. Ugh! Not useful at all, and so, as I knew it would be, there was no getting around doing it manually.
So in the break I took, I reflected on the course of two years and what I really didn't like and did like.
I didn't like the lecturers' over-whelming reliance on Powerpoint slides in their presentations.
I really didn't.
And I told them, and I showed them and my class how I use Apple's Keynote to deliver images and simple message while telling them stories, of which I have plenty, especially if I knew my material.
In Sydney for my national society's conference (which I have blogged on this page) every session I attended was filled with Powerpoint presentations. Only one or two could be recommended for its use of multimedia... Something rotten's happening in the academic and dare I say the business world too.
I had a meeting the other day with the CEO of a private group of business leaders to see if I had something to offer them in 2005 for their regular meetings. At the end of the quite friendly and productive meeting, I asked about projectors and multimedia equipment. Sooner or later, we were both discussing how in business there is far too much reliance on selling with Powerpoint, and how few presentations were memorable if they included Powerpoint. I joked with her that I'd be quite happy to do a session on the psychology of presenting, with a special focus on Powerpoint.
We also discussed my time spent these past two years doing formal studies in Knowledge Management.
As a mature-age working student (we all were in this course), I had a chance to contemplate how we were educated and taught. In particular I couldn't help but compare the experience with how I learnt in previous formal arrangements including professional workshops and tertiary studies.
These included my undergraduate degree, then post-graduate diploma and Masters. Following years in practice, I returned to study in a "guild" style model, taking up initially an honorary hospital position in Clinical Psychology which turned into a paid registrarship. Ten years after that I went back part-time for the new Knowledge Management course as the only psychologist amongst lawyers, IT specialists, teachers, administrators and doctors.
Since I have also lectured, and given corporate workshops and training seminars, I was also aware of the challenges of presenting, especially to a group who have spent years in the workforce, and who are eager to apply all they learn.
While I have been extraordinarily stimulated by the course, I have been profoundly disappointed with the over-reliance of technology to deliver information.
I can say that the best teaching I enjoyed in my course was from lecturers who stood in front of the group and powerfully led a discussion, with the occasional low-tech overhead projector graphic to display one or two points.
The worst were full-day workshop/lectures where the staff member dulled the group into a collective comatose state by displays of Powerpoint slides with vast tracts of cut-and-pasted text, with paragraphs brought in to view using that application's dinky special effects. Frankly, when dealing with concepts such as motivational theories I didn't need words and letters flying on and off the page to keep me interested.
This is the current way it seems to teach. Powerpoint slides projected while students receive handouts summarising the slides with lined areas where extra notes can be added.
Those of us in the course whose professional backgrounds included some kind of professional supervision for initial and ongoing membership of professional societies did the most eye-rolling in some of these lectures. We came from the school that said, and continues to say, you learn from your lecturers, then your supervisors, but most from your clients and patients, i.e., in the workplace setting within a mentoring philosophy.
Dumping vast tracts of data and diagrams into a slide show didn't do it for us.
Others have also written about corporate over-reliance on Powerpoint slides to teach and educate. In September's Harvard Business review, Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap write:
"Your best employees' deepest knowledge can't be transferred onto a series of PowerPoint slides or downloaded into a data depository. It has to be passed on in person - slowly, patiently, and systematically." Think of the learning you did in your training, for those in client-based employment, and you get the drift of what the authors are getting at.
I must say that in the corporate sector, as soon as I know I am about to get a Powerpoint presentation, I reflexively grit my teeth and expect the worst. Having been around when the first desktop publishing systems were invented (probably after the release of the Macintosh and Laserpinter in the late 80s), I can remember how inexperienced users bombarded the reader with pages filled with different fonts and lettering styles. Because it made it more legible and impactful? No! Because, they could!
When the laser printer was discovered in academic circles, and overhead plastic sheets could be safely printed on, we saw paragraphs packed onto slides, then covered over with paper in lectures to slowly and potently reveal, as if by magic, the next important point. That "technique" has been replaced with the sliding bullet point, careening its way onto the projected image. It's amazing more don't use Powerpoint's audio capacities to offer the sound of fired bullets or screeching tires when this happens, but you get my drift.
In other words, I have been appalled to see lecturers adroitly use all the nifty Powerpoint "Gee Whiz - I thought that could only be done in Hollywood" special effects, and thinking that is good teaching.
It's not, and I am not the first or only one to say so.
The most vociferous critic of over-reliance on Powerpoint-type presentations is Edward Tufte. In the September 2003 online Wired magazine (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html), he wrote a piece which truly set the cat amongst the pigeons entitled: "PowerPoint Is Evil- Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely."
What did Tufte say? Things like:
"The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch."
and
"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."
and he concludes thus:
"PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience."
Now Tufte's article sums up a lot of what experience in the tertiary setting. Moreover, once published and having let the cat out of the bag, others joined in the chorus of Powerpoint criticisms.
Richard Anderson, writing in the Syllabus website cited in my introductory paragraph wrote:
"Both students and instructors complain about the impact of using slides in lecture. One colleague expressed this directly as, "PowerPoint sucks the life out of a class."
...The basic issue is that electronic slides tend to script a lecture and do not provide mechanisms to adapt the presentation to the audience. An important part of lecturing is adjusting material in response to audience reactions and developing spontaneous examples and explanations to clarify and expand on topics. The weakness of electronic projection of slides is the absence of a means to alter or augment the displayed material to do this."
And in more disturbing commentary, the New York Times published a report from NASA examining the Columbia shuttle disaster of February 2003 holding Powerpoint partially responsible because of how engineers used it to discuss the likelihood of foam harming the shuttle's wing on launch.
On another site, I located the following: "Along with four technical reports, the NASA Engineering and Safety Center produced a four-page newsletter summarizing the technical activities and some lessons learned. The biggest lesson, [NESC Director Ralph] Roe said, is to curb the practice of "PowerPoint engineering."
The Columbia report chided NASA engineers for their reliance on bulleted presentations. In the four studies, the inspectors came to agree that PowerPoint slides are not a good tool for providing substantive documentation of results. "We think it's important to go back to the basics," Roe said. "We're making it a point with the agency that engineering organizations need to go back to writing engineering reports."
Do I use Powerpoint?
I have - once. It was to a group of University students in psychology and I spoke about careers in psychology. It was my first and only use of it.
But I do use presentation software like Keynote which has seen me get rave reviews from my fellow students for how I integrate its special abilities (extremely high quality graphics and text, with superb transitions) with my message giving. I consistently use white non-seraph fonts on a blackboard style background; no more than three lines of text per slide which I bring on in one go, or slowly dissolve onto the screen which is very easy on the eye, and I incorporate movies and graphics effectively. Most people who see it say they have never seen a Powerpoint presentation like it, and no, they haven't.
Using the software helps me collect my ideas, but never at the cost of the slides taking over. What I've found is that I must be on top of my material to use a slide show and be prepared to skip slides (or quickly go back) as the lecture, workshop or presentation demands. I don't stand near my laptop. I use my soney-Ericsson T610 cellphone to change slides remotely using my Powerbook's Bluetooth wireless configuration and Jonas Salling's Clicker software, and my physical mobility is an analogous to my psychological mobility in moving around the topic, rather than be inflexibly tied to it.
Indeed, my best presentations have been those with minimal words and maximal pictures, diagrams or movies I can talk about and discuss. The knowledge I want to share comes from the stories I tell, not from the slides displaying data points or sentences. And they're ones where I ask questions of the audience to help me moderate my stories to suit the audience.
Granted, if you are lecturing to undergrads, you want to get maximise information you can get across in the time available, but please, don't expect you are engaged in teaching. If you teach like this, ask yourself if you are hiding behind your slides to cover up your own knowledge deficits or if this is the best way to share your knowledge or know-how. And whatever you do, don't treat your class (or your corporate colleagues) as simpletons by reading the slide text - it's insulting.
And if you're in the corporate world, break out of the Powerpoint strangehold on delivering content to your clients. They will appreciate it.
Other opinions I value which support what I am saying comes from Steve Denning, former Knowledge Management head at the World Bank. His interview with Cliff Atkinson is here. Worth the read.
So is Cliff's interview with writer and consultant, Michael Schrage:
Cliff Atkinson: Michael, is PowerPoint having a big impact on communications, or is it simply reflecting trends that have been going on all along?
Michael Schrage: The most vicious criticisms of PowerPoint are absolutely true. But the people who believe that PowerPoint has done a fabulous job of clarifying are also right. Most adults know within 90 seconds whether a PowerPoint sucks or is useful. When it works, it's fabulous and it reinforces the talk. In the hands of people who know how to use it, it reinforces their credibility. In the hands of people who take the path of least resistance, it undermines it. I've seen literally the abstract of three Ph.D. theses on a single slide - what’s the point of that? I'm not the only person in the room wondering that. The fact that incompetence in PowerPoint is so easy to identify, really makes it so much easier for the audience to assess the intelligence of the speaker.
CA: What is an effective PowerPoint design approach?
MS: Once you're talking about designing the "presentation", you're defining the presentation to the exclusion of meaningful interaction. Instead, you should ask how much time you spend focused on how the audience is going to interact with you.
It's time to stop the Powerpoint madness. Time to really think how to best get your message across. Time to stop being afraid of doing presentations - if you think you overuse Powerpoint, ask for a whiteboard next time, and do a high wire act by knowing your material. Or allow the beauty of Keynote to guide you into how to present.
Go look at Steve Jobs and how he presents. You could learn a lot.
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