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Powerpoint presentations bad for learning
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besson3c
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Apr 5, 2007, 09:19 AM
 
This is a nice follow-up from an earlier thread in here about whether Powerpoint presentations can be used in a productive manner, or whether they are a detriment to learning.

As it turns out, this researcher feels that putting bullet points on a PP presentation is bad:

Research points the finger at PowerPoint - Technology - smh.com.au


I'm assuming this also applies to Keynote

I've always thought that these tools make it easy to give a bad/ineffective presentation, but felt that they could be used productively. I guess this only applies to presentations that include charts and graphs...
     
centerchannel68
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Apr 5, 2007, 09:43 AM
 
I don't understand. Could you make this into a presentation with bulleted lists as to why they're ineffective?
     
Sherman Homan
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Apr 5, 2007, 10:25 AM
 
I have seen PowerPoint presentations that were so boring that it made your teeth hurt. But it isn't PowerPoint, you can make ghastly presentations in Keynote and you can deadly lectures with just one person and no technology at all. Of course the opposite is also true, a good presenter can rivet an audience with no electronics. I am sure that there have been good PowerPoint presentations... right?
     
Dakar²
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Apr 5, 2007, 10:26 AM
 
I'm not sure powerpoint is to blame here as much as why the decision is usually made to use it.
     
besson3c  (op)
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Apr 5, 2007, 10:30 AM
 
Originally Posted by Sherman Homan View Post
I have seen PowerPoint presentations that were so boring that it made your teeth hurt. But it isn't PowerPoint, you can make ghastly presentations in Keynote and you can deadly lectures with just one person and no technology at all. Of course the opposite is also true, a good presenter can rivet an audience with no electronics. I am sure that there have been good PowerPoint presentations... right?

Right, but what interests me about this article is that the conventional wisdom (and the consensus in here, if I"m not mistaken) has always been that it is good to use a presentation to highlight your key arguments with bullet points. This research suggests that this is not true.
     
Sherman Homan
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Apr 5, 2007, 10:49 AM
 
Agreed, but the article makes a really weird conclusion:
The Australian researchers who made the findings may have pronounced the death of the PowerPoint presentation.
The article literally throws the baby out with the bath water. I think that bullet points work as long as they are really short and to the point. The presenter then has the responsibility to flesh out the information. The worst presentations are a screen full of text that the presenter then reads out loud.
     
besson3c  (op)
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Apr 5, 2007, 10:55 AM
 
Originally Posted by Sherman Homan View Post
Agreed, but the article makes a really weird conclusion: The article literally throws the baby out with the bath water. I think that bullet points work as long as they are really short and to the point. The presenter then has the responsibility to flesh out the information. The worst presentations are a screen full of text that the presenter then reads out loud.

But the article is saying that information is not absorbed when it is read and shown at the same time. If a presenter were to only show a point while he talks about something else, would you absorb it then? I believe there is also a great deal of research which says that we don't multitask as well as we think we do... You could justify this by looking at people who talk and drive at the same time, and the fatality rates there.

The "end of Powerpoint" thing is just the author's own commentary, I'm not as concerned about that argument...

The other arguments about this have to do with whether a teacher should "entertain" a student and use mediums relevant to today. I'm somewhere between ambivalent and slightly convinced over the latter, but I think that trying to entertain kids is throwing gas on the fire. Learning is hard, and it should be... If it is valued, the prize should be worth the struggle.

I have a habit of throwing too much discussion material at a thread at once, sorry!
     
BRussell
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Apr 5, 2007, 11:03 AM
 
I really don't see how you can avoid showing words that you're talking about in a lecture. There are always words that need to be spelled, like new words or proper names. Even writing words on the board, according to this, is wrong. Sorry but I don't buy that.
     
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Apr 5, 2007, 11:08 AM
 
Originally Posted by Dakar² View Post
I'm not sure powerpoint is to blame here as much as why the decision is usually made to use it.
I'm inclined to agree. PowerPoint isn't inherently bad, but very few people know how to make proper use of it -I can't do it either- and the program itself makes no attempt to guide the user toward styles that promote learning. It actually manages to be too free-form.
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besson3c  (op)
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Apr 5, 2007, 11:09 AM
 
Originally Posted by BRussell View Post
I really don't see how you can avoid showing words that you're talking about in a lecture. There are always words that need to be spelled, like new words or proper names. Even writing words on the board, according to this, is wrong. Sorry but I don't buy that.

My sense was that the article is suggesting that showing the words and talking over them or reading them outloud is ineffective. If you were to show the word and shut up and let it sit there for a few moments, I think that would be fine.

I think there is some sort of psychological explanation as to why this works, although I can't remember the details. Perhaps it also explains why we can't do simple things (easily) like rub our tummies while we scratch our heads?
     
Timo
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Apr 5, 2007, 11:13 AM
 
A fellow who has been arguing along (some of) these lines for years:

Edward Tufte: Books - Envisioning Information

What I don't like about many powerpoint et al presentations is that they break it down for you, with the bullet points insisting on what your take-away from the lecture is. I prefer the active interpretation of a presentation, with visuals being mostly visual, and amplifying rather than duplicating the presentation.
     
Dakar²
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Apr 5, 2007, 11:25 AM
 
I should clarify what I was saying since I wasn't sure of what I was saying at the time.

The kind of people who gravitate towards using powerpoint are probably the type of people who would do a poor job of teaching regadless. It seems like a clever and useful tool to those who have no real ability to teach.
( Last edited by Dakar²; Apr 5, 2007 at 11:32 AM. )
     
BRussell
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Apr 5, 2007, 11:30 AM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
My sense was that the article is suggesting that showing the words and talking over them or reading them outloud is ineffective. If you were to show the word and shut up and let it sit there for a few moments, I think that would be fine.

I think there is some sort of psychological explanation as to why this works, although I can't remember the details. Perhaps it also explains why we can't do simple things (easily) like rub our tummies while we scratch our heads?
In the past two years, I've been (reluctantly) using Keynote in a few classes, rather than writing on the board and using transparencies, so I've been thinking a lot about this recently.

One of the reasons I did it was to put the slides online where students can download them. I still see that as a big advantage.

I think the problem comes when you try to put everything on the slides. You need to put only the bare minimum - major topic changes, words that need spelling, figures, pictures. Listeners need to be engaged, and to be engaged they have to do a little work imposing some of their own organization onto the material. Comprehensive outlines or bullet-points with every single idea put in a list just make the listener way too passive.

I don't really buy the multi-tasking argument. I'm a cognitive psychologist, and I can only think of research showing that presenting information in multiple ways improves memory. I think the key is organizing and elaborating on the information (two good memory buzz words), which is next to impossible if you're just copying down someone's list.
     
Gossamer
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Apr 5, 2007, 11:49 AM
 
I've seen it go both ways. I've had professors read off the slides, which is awful. I had one professor (Statics) with a tablet PC that had each example problem already typed out, then he would read off the numbers. The guy is a freaking robot. I also had a professor (Mechanics of Materials) with a tablet that would have diagrams on prepared slides, then would work them out by hand with the tablet and pen. He'd record the screen and his voice so we could later download the lectures and watch him work and talk through problems when we were trying to get homework or projects done. I liked that.
     
finboy
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Apr 5, 2007, 12:00 PM
 
Originally Posted by BRussell View Post
One of the reasons I did it was to put the slides online where students can download them. I still see that as a big advantage.

I think the problem comes when you try to put everything on the slides. You need to put only the bare minimum - major topic changes, words that need spelling, figures, pictures. Listeners need to be engaged, and to be engaged they have to do a little work imposing some of their own organization onto the material. Comprehensive outlines or bullet-points with every single idea put in a list just make the listener way too passive.
The content needs to be online, most students expect that now. So they can print out slides to bring to class -- they don't really expect to take notes if it's out there. I still give 8-10 pages of notes per hour ON TOP OF the bullet lists, so I've adjusted my lecture style so they can't keep up without the outlines.

I've gone back and forth with how much PowerPoint presentations should be "self-contained." I have a lot of travelling students, and it's always good for them to have a little more than an outline, especially for things that aren't "in the book." They don't really pay attention to supplements as much as they will PowerPoints, so it's a tough area to commit one way or the other.

I've been using PowerPoint in one way or another since Mac version 3 (back then, just to do my outlines). I'm still learning. It's a fact of life, though, that for all the complaining that we hear from students, they expect/demand presentation frameworks available 24/7.
     
besson3c  (op)
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Apr 5, 2007, 12:17 PM
 
Originally Posted by finboy View Post
The content needs to be online, most students expect that now. So they can print out slides to bring to class -- they don't really expect to take notes if it's out there. I still give 8-10 pages of notes per hour ON TOP OF the bullet lists, so I've adjusted my lecture style so they can't keep up without the outlines.

I've gone back and forth with how much PowerPoint presentations should be "self-contained." I have a lot of travelling students, and it's always good for them to have a little more than an outline, especially for things that aren't "in the book." They don't really pay attention to supplements as much as they will PowerPoints, so it's a tough area to commit one way or the other.

I've been using PowerPoint in one way or another since Mac version 3 (back then, just to do my outlines). I'm still learning. It's a fact of life, though, that for all the complaining that we hear from students, they expect/demand presentation frameworks available 24/7.

Are these expectations reasonable? There was a time when stuff couldn't be downloaded, and people had to attend classes and write their own notes. I'm not saying that we should all go back to this, but these expectations don't have very much to do with what is necessary for learning to take place, IMHO.

One of the major problems with the education system, according to my own perceptions, is that we are expecting students to merely become regurgitators of knowledge. We expect them to be able to take notes and perform on tests (many tests involving pure short-term memory work), but perhaps there isn't as much emphasis put on actual critical thinking? A teacher should be able to come up with a problem or question that requires a student to think a little bit outside of what they have studied for the test, and come up with something reasonably intelligent that applies some of what they have learned.

One of the coolest final exams I ever had in University was "here is a subject, write something intelligent about this presenting some arguments and rationale that incorporates some things that we have learned".

We've had this argument in here before too, but I remain a FIRM believer that students should be able to do at least simple arithmetic without relying on a calculator. Just because calculators are widely available and used in the "real world" means nothing - you should still be able to understand how these results were derived - period.

There is too much emphasis on this "real world" sort of crap in education. We need to crank out critical thinkers and an informed electorate, not simply people that are capable of entering the workforce.
     
Dakar²
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Apr 5, 2007, 12:20 PM
 
Please define 'real world' sort of crap.
     
besson3c  (op)
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Apr 5, 2007, 12:38 PM
 
Originally Posted by Dakar² View Post
Please define 'real world' sort of crap.
Yes, I should have defined that.. sorry!

I guess real world budgeting, cooking good meals, and life skills like that are useful, but teaching a particular version of a particular program on a particular program because that is what they are using in the real world is dumb, IMHO. Not teaching arithmetic on paper as I've described above because people use calculators and computers in the real world is dumb.

Does this make sense?
     
Dakar²
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Apr 5, 2007, 12:40 PM
 
They teach arithmetic on paper in gradeschool. Cooking and budgeting comes later. What am I missing?
     
besson3c  (op)
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Apr 5, 2007, 12:42 PM
 
Originally Posted by Dakar² View Post
They teach arithmetic on paper in gradeschool. Cooking and budgeting comes later. What am I missing?

I take back what I said. There is too much emphasis placed on this from the perspectives of people criticizing education and what they think it ought to accomplish.
     
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Apr 5, 2007, 02:09 PM
 
I find in interesting that those who have no clue about pedagogical matters feel educated enough to say how a teaching style is ineffetive. Why do people think they can find THE perfect way to teach, when students have a large variety of learning styles.

Powerpoint is just a semi-static blackboard. Some teachers know how to use a black board, some have no clue. Some teachers know how to use a powerpoint presentation effectively, some have no clue. In my education classes you can quickly see who is comfortable using what medium to get the intruction across effectively.

I have professor who makes some amazing PP slides. He also supplies them for download and I have found that I don't have to take any notes at all and I am currently carrying a 98% in that class.

To say that the PP is dead is just as ignorant as saying the blackboard is dead.
     
freudling
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Apr 5, 2007, 02:12 PM
 
Another powerpoint thread...

We have been through this already. Search the forums, there is good discussion on why powerpoint is generally stupid and only has a few uses.

The point is that powerpoint should be a presentation roadmap for a presenter, but the bullets, etc. don't necessarily have to be shown to the audience. Only the presenter should be looking at it. But everyone decided to show the audience on projectors what their roadmap is, like audiences were assumed to be dumb in that they do not have the ability to conceptualize information on their own and take their own notes.

The best presentations are when the presenter rings off his topic from his mind, and uses the board occassionally to draw things up. It is more fluid, animated, and less distracting. Stupid transitions, dumb bullets, ugly colors... I just want it to die.
     
Dakar²
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Apr 5, 2007, 02:16 PM
 
Originally Posted by Railroader View Post
I find in interesting that those who have no clue about pedagogical matters feel educated enough to say how a teaching style is ineffetive.
Well most of us have had to go through school and learn at some point, so the majority of us have probably been on the receiving end of various teaching styles, so judging from our own success, we too probably have a pretty good idea of what works.
     
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Apr 5, 2007, 02:41 PM
 
Originally Posted by Dakar² View Post
Well most of us have had to go through school and learn at some point, so the majority of us have probably been on the receiving end of various teaching styles, so judging from our own success, we too probably have a pretty good idea of what works.
I do not intend this to sound rude or mean in any way, but this is a very ignorant belief. There is a reason teachers have to spend 30+ university credit hours in the area of teaching methods. There is a very large number of teaching methods for various situations, and to say that any one teaching method is "dead" is unintelligent.
     
Dakar²
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Apr 5, 2007, 02:43 PM
 
Originally Posted by Railroader View Post
I do not intend this to sound rude or mean in any way, but this is a very ignorant belief.
That I know what kind of teaching does or doesn't work on me?

Originally Posted by Railroader View Post
There is a very large number of teaching methods for various situations, and to say that any one teaching method is "dead" is unintelligent.
Take that up with the article. I certainly didn't say that.
     
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Apr 5, 2007, 02:47 PM
 
Originally Posted by Dakar² View Post
That I know what kind of teaching does or doesn't work on me?

Take that up with the article. I certainly didn't say that.
Exactly, what works for you may not work for someone else. As well, what works for one teacher doesn't work for another.

I am addressing anyone who believes the article.
     
Dakar²
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Apr 5, 2007, 02:50 PM
 
Originally Posted by Railroader View Post
Exactly, what works for you may not work for someone else. As well, what works for one teacher doesn't work for another.
And some things are less likely to work on any student and some are more.

Originally Posted by Railroader View Post
I am addressing anyone who believes the article.
Then don't quote me when making points not meant for me.
     
grayware
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Apr 5, 2007, 04:02 PM
 
I was talking with one of my clients just yesterday about my utter dislike for PPoint, specifically the typical presentations we've all been subjected to suffering through. I mentioned that the only engaging and effective PPoint (actually Keynote) I've ever seen was by Tom Monahan. I had him in to get the marketing group I worked with a few years ago to expand our possibilities of thinking creatively.

He starts off with a short discussion and then asks us if we're ready to get into it. So he sits down at his laptop in the front of the room and not saying one word prompts slide after slide of brief questions sprinkled with excellent, silly little animations. We were engaged. We learned something. Granted that wasn't the bulk of the seminar, just a clever and atypical thought-provoking introduction but that was the only good use of these presentation programs I've seen in person.

David Byrne does some artful things w/ PPoint.

Yep, Edward Tufte. I saw him about 9 years ago and he sure gets it about information presentation.
     
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Apr 5, 2007, 04:05 PM
 
Originally Posted by Dakar² View Post
And some things are less likely to work on any student and some are more.
Ah... but that's not the point of the article.
Originally Posted by Dakar² View Post
Then don't quote me when making points not meant for me.
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Dakar²
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Apr 5, 2007, 04:10 PM
 
Originally Posted by Railroader View Post
Ah... but that's not the point of the article.
I didn't realize I had to agree with 100% of it or none of it.

Originally Posted by Railroader View Post
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Your call, but you see what you get when I keep thinking you're talking to me.
     
finboy
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Apr 5, 2007, 04:24 PM
 
To break from the thread at hand: Some thoughts on education in general

Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Does this make sense?
Yes it does. It's the debate between skills training and a "traditional" liberal arts education. It's relevant today -- if we're not careful, we end up stressing how to do this with this program and this with this equation, and forget about the reasons why one would want to do those things and the theory/reasoning behind the skills, or why those skills should be used in the first place. The debate has gone on forever. Charles Murray had something in the WSJ a couple months ago about it, three editorial pieces over three days, but one asked "what's wrong with vocational school?" Given the focus of so much post-secondary education now is on skills training and not "how to noodle something out for yourself," he may have something there. [Yes, I know he's the evil bastard that wrote the dreaded racist tome "The Bell Curve." I forgive him for now.]

Again, it's an important consideration -- training versus education. Training is task-based, education is based on a comprehensive understanding of the world, or your corner of it, big picture first. We're moving more and more toward task-based stuff and away from thinking, but given the bias in most liberal arts programs toward fuzzy logic, that's not necessarily a bad thing for the time behind. Hippocrates would probably agree.

There is a reason teachers have to spend 30+ university credit hours in the area of teaching methods.
I agree, there IS a reason: so that education professors have something to do in their spare time, and so that education departments can fill chairs. Having taken almost that many graduate hours of pedagogy stuff (if you include psychometrics), I can tell you that most of it ends up being about why we should help little Johnny deal with having two mommies, for good or evil.

College teaching is an apprenticeship system (some say indentured servitude). A generation ago, and before, college professors typically had no professional training on pedagogy, unless that was their field. So the folks teaching all of the teachers didn't rely on "30+ hours" until just recently. I think we'll all agree that education has improved drastically in the past two generations (right....). In most fields, professors don't take any education credits, because other than the research methods courses the classes are treated like jokes. They might take some B psych or something, depending on their area and the research questions there.

I recently had a colleague of mine whining about taking a whole month to write her health education doctoral dissertation. That says lots right there.

Now back to the previously scheduled thread. The upshot of what I mentioned is that many professors/teachers/presenters don't have the background to recognize when PowerPoint doesn't work. Also, though, as I mentioned before, students EXPECT PowerPoint, and they want to download slides, whether the material is suited to that type of learning or not. They, to some extent, don't really want to learn how to develop an opinion of their own, but many just want to know how to do the stuff that will be on the test. Our system of feedback locks us in to PowerPoint and other over-the-counter methods, or at least contributes.

OK, so that went a little long-winded. But hey, this is what we do for a living.
( Last edited by finboy; Apr 5, 2007 at 04:32 PM. )
     
besson3c  (op)
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Apr 5, 2007, 04:50 PM
 
finboy: so, can a single teacher combat this, or is this something that needs to change from the top down? What would you do?
     
tie
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Apr 5, 2007, 05:02 PM
 
What classes are you talking about? When I was in college, Powerpoint slides were very rare. In college and graduate school, I can think of only two or three classes where the professor used slides, and these were definitely low-thought-content classes. If students didn't want to take notes, then a common arrangement was to have one or two students scribe the lecture for everyone else. I think it depends drastically on the type of class.
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Apr 5, 2007, 05:22 PM
 
Originally Posted by Timo View Post
A fellow who has been arguing along (some of) these lines for years:

Edward Tufte: Books - Envisioning Information
his discussion threads cover ppt in depth as well. good reading
one post closer to five stars
     
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Apr 5, 2007, 07:08 PM
 
Originally Posted by finboy View Post
I agree, there IS a reason: so that education professors have something to do in their spare time, and so that education departments can fill chairs. Having taken almost that many graduate hours of pedagogy stuff (if you include psychometrics), I can tell you that most of it ends up being about why we should help little Johnny deal with having two mommies, for good or evil.
You need to switch schools.
     
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Apr 5, 2007, 07:10 PM
 
Originally Posted by tie View Post
What classes are you talking about? When I was in college, Powerpoint slides were very rare. In college and graduate school, I can think of only two or three classes where the professor used slides, and these were definitely low-thought-content classes. If students didn't want to take notes, then a common arrangement was to have one or two students scribe the lecture for everyone else. I think it depends drastically on the type of class.
Welcome to 2007.

I am sitting in class and the teacher is using Powerpoint right now. It is a 3rd year Aviation Transportation Sciences class. Lots of good data. He uses PP very effectively.
     
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Apr 5, 2007, 08:50 PM
 
All my history classes in college have been powerpoint based. They're great. That said, none of my drawing classes, materials classes, product design classes, electronics classes, etc have been powerpoint based, which is good.
     
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Apr 5, 2007, 09:22 PM
 
I find it degrading to have someone read his freakin' slides to me. That makes it seem like he doesn't think I can read them for myself-and it shows that he's put way too much detail in the slides to begin with.

Presentations should include only a bare outline of what's to be discussed, not the text of a speech. My own presentations are like this:
>First, overall point (I can spend five minutes talking about this as an introduction)
>Supporting point (more detail)
>Supporting point (more detail)
>>Important fact about supporting point (only if everyone needs specific, detailed data on this)
>Second point...

I learned to speak extemporaneously from a thin outline because if you KNOW what you're talking about (even have a clue about it), an outline is all you need, either as notes or as slides.

Less is better
Easy to read beats the living crap out of bells and whistles
Fewer lines and more slides is way better than lots of lines on fewer slides (see "less is better")
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Apr 5, 2007, 10:32 PM
 
I teach college chemistry by handwriting on a Tablet PC that's projected on a screen. Then, I put PDFs of what I wrote on the webpage. I find the students concentrate more on me and what I'm saying than reading and trying to transcribe the slides. I also find myself doing more and more active learning (students working problems, thinking critically, forming opinions, etc). With the attention span these students have, a straight lecture will lose almost all of them.

I've also been experimenting with recording audio and video from this as well. Surprisingly it hasn't decreased attendance - many use it after the fact to re-learn concepts or watch problems being solved.

I have yet to see a science class effectively taught using slides. Normally way too much info is crammed on the slides - the students pay attention to the words and the sentences, not on the ideas and the concepts.
( Last edited by awaspaas; Apr 5, 2007 at 10:39 PM. )
     
brassplayersrock²
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Apr 7, 2007, 07:29 PM
 
some people argue just to argue........


alex
     
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Apr 7, 2007, 11:44 PM
 
Originally Posted by brassplayersrock View Post
some people argue just to argue........


alex
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finboy
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Apr 8, 2007, 01:44 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
Are these expectations reasonable? There was a time when stuff couldn't be downloaded, and people had to attend classes and write their own notes. I'm not saying that we should all go back to this, but these expectations don't have very much to do with what is necessary for learning to take place, IMHO.
I can't really argue with that, or your next point, except to say that student expectations really drive a lot of what we do. Used to be we could push a lot harder, but not so much anymore. Most of my grad students still pull things along and take the rigor and run with it, but only a handful of my undergrads want to learn anything. It's not a function of school, really -- even at top 10 undergrad programs, it's somewhat the same. A large sense of entitlement pervades higher ed. If I don't put things online (essentially freezing the prep, too) then folks get their nose out of joint. Taking notes (and giving notes, in my experience) is almost a lost art.
     
finboy
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Apr 8, 2007, 01:47 PM
 
Originally Posted by awaspaas View Post
Surprisingly it hasn't decreased attendance - many use it after the fact to re-learn concepts or watch problems being solved.
It hasn't decreased attendance YET. But there's enough hubris in the average undergrad that they will eventually take it for granted and then not do well, with it being your fault that they didn't do well. Then you'll have to truncate your coverage to fit what they CAN learn away from class -- that's the cycle I've seen. Not so much in my discipline, but in others.
     
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Apr 8, 2007, 01:49 PM
 
Originally Posted by Railroader View Post
You need to switch schools.
It doesn't really make a difference which school we're talking about, or the time period for that matter. Maybe if I was taking something hardcore like Aviation classes, I'd see a difference.
     
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Apr 8, 2007, 01:50 PM
 
Originally Posted by ghporter View Post
I find it degrading to have someone read his freakin' slides to me. That makes it seem like he doesn't think I can read them for myself-and it shows that he's put way too much detail in the slides to begin with.
You'd be the perfect grad student, but I doubt you'd fit in very well in a lot of curricula. I still find that with my bunch, depending upon the semester, but most of them are engineers and scientists. I always get comments from both sides, either too much PowerPoint or not enough. Unfortunately, the "not enough" crowd is usually a little bigger.
( Last edited by finboy; Apr 8, 2007 at 02:53 PM. )
     
ghporter
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Apr 8, 2007, 02:58 PM
 
My favorite professor published (as a PDF) the outline of her presentations and simply stuck to them. If she wrote something on the board, it was important, so you wrote it down and thus remembered it. After class, I'd capture the text from the PDF outline and transcribe my handwritten notes into her outline's structure. This gave me 1) a structure to follow the lesson with, 2) a listing of key points, terms, and interrelations, and 3) an idea of what to expect in each lesson, from which I could structure my reading in the texts. It was superb!

Near the end of my last semester with her she moved from displaying visual aids with an overhead projector to using a rostrum camera and the classroom's digital projector. Otherwise, she was rock solid "this is what I'm covering today."

Contrast that with one instructor I had at a community college. This person provided the class with printed PowerPoint "handout" pages from her presentations. Not only would she not notice things like the fact that she crammed so much stuff onto each slide that if she (frequently) left the drop shadow from the template in place that the handout slides were virtually unreadable, but she couldn't figure out the whole "a red underline means you've misspelled something" paradigm. Since this was a class titled "Medical Terminology," you'd think that she'd be concerned about that... Wrong. She also liked froofy bells and whistles on her slides, which made them look like a 7th grade "expressionist" art class assignment. At a "special school." It was very sad.

Originally Posted by finboy View Post
You'd be the perfect grad student, but I doubt you'd fit in very well in a lot of curricula. I still find that with my bunch, depending upon the semester, but most of them are engineers and scientists. I always get comments from both sides, either too much PowerPoint or not enough. Unfortunately, the "not enough" crowd is usually a little bigger.
I am a grad student. In a "professional, graduate program." I also spent almost 12 years teaching college courses for the largest community college in the world.

Reading the text on a slide to the audience has ONE legitimate purpose: to reinforce that specific text is vital and must be retained VERBATIM. There is very little call for that sort of teaching in post-secondary educational settings (including professional conferences), and not much in pre- and secondary education for that matter. If you don't have the information as part of your consciousness, then put it on your notes, but DON'T treat your audience like they're illiterate.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
finboy
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Apr 8, 2007, 03:20 PM
 
Originally Posted by ghporter View Post
My favorite professor published (as a PDF) the outline of her presentations and simply stuck to them. If she wrote something on the board, it was important, so you wrote it down and thus remembered it. After class, I'd capture the text from the PDF outline and transcribe my handwritten notes into her outline's structure. This gave me 1) a structure to follow the lesson with, 2) a listing of key points, terms, and interrelations, and 3) an idea of what to expect in each lesson, from which I could structure my reading in the texts. It was superb!
That's basically the study model that I used from the last few years of undergrad on, and it worked for me. It was expected, I think, back then.

I consistently refuse to read my PowerPoints to the students, but I've observed that I'm in the minority. I try to make them complement the lecture, but I also want them to have enough structure to stand alone somewhat. The only compromise I've really made is to create HUGE slide sets and only cover those that are bullet points and major outline pieces.

I wish all of the students these days had the same set of skills you have, but they don't. In fact, those students who take your approach are often ostracized by the others -- the "don't rock the boat" appeal. It's not so bad, that I've seen at least, in the hard sciences, but many of the other classes are filled by seat warmers.

If by "the largest community college in the world" you mean Community College of the Air Force (or whatever they're calling it now), then I salute you. It's a great organization. I'd argue, though, that the consistuency is a little different for that school than most public universities and/or comm. colleges. There's a little more active incentive structure at CCAF than in most schools, even the best ones.
     
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Apr 8, 2007, 05:33 PM
 
Yep, CCAF. And while the student population is indeed different, one of the most interesting things about CCAF is that it is actually interested in education, rather than "research to the detriment of classes" or "gotta get tenure or I'll be out of a job, so screw the students" and all that other horse poo that goes on in more traditional colleges. I have received credit for formal training I received as part of my duties, credit from schools that no longer existed when I submitted the transcripts, and even got credit for Phys Ed for completing Basic Training. Nobody asked questions about the schools' reputations, just whether or not they were accredited. And of course my tenure as a faculty member was in the course of my official duties as well. Of the more traditional community colleges I've attended (four others), most had a somewhat similar attitude toward education, but only CCAF made it easy to get that education and apply it to a higher degree. (I'm also on my fifth university at this point, but that's a very different story!)

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
turtle777
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Apr 8, 2007, 08:03 PM
 
Powerpoint is like democracy:

the worst form of presentation tool, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

W. Churchill.

-t
     
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Apr 8, 2007, 09:01 PM
 
Originally Posted by finboy View Post
It doesn't really make a difference which school we're talking about, or the time period for that matter. Maybe if I was taking something hardcore like Aviation classes, I'd see a difference.
It does certainly matter what school apparently.

Nah, you probably wouldn't.
     
 
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