what's wrong with Power Point

a comment posted about Frank Cardulla's high school chemistry course at The Great Teaching Company:

"I bought this course to help my oldest son in his high school chemistry class. I had a tough time convincing him to view the videos so I decided that it might be better if I viewed them first and then used what I learned to tutor him. It worked like a charm. I would bring my personal DVD player each day on my workouts and finished the whole series in about two weeks. It gave me everything that I needed to help my son do better. Honestly, as a college instructor myself I found it refreshing that he made extensive use of the paper and easel. It was a nice relief from the PowerPoint "poisoning" that we are often subjected to in modern day classrooms and board rooms. It also was good to see how he slowly built up to the solution of a problem rather than simply magically having the answer appear in pretty text on the screen. This course was an absolute joy. If there is ever another course produced by him in the future I will be sure to buy it."

IQs up, verbal intelligence down

PowerPoint isn't writing

if Abe Lincoln had PowerPoint

IQs up, verbal intelligence down

Andrew Gelman on Science, Nature, & Nature Neuroscience:

As Seth points out, the authors write that many of the mistakes appear in "such prominent journals as Science, Nature, and Nature Neuroscience." My impression is that these hypercompetitive journals have a pretty random reviewing process, at least for articles outside of their core competence of laboratory biology. Publication in such journals is taken much more of a seal of approval than it should be, I think. The authors of this article are doing a useful service by pointing this out.

Suspiciously high correlations in brain imaging studies

Coming across this observation was a case of synchronicity, because I had just yesterday put the finishing touches on a citizen's op ed re: technology vs critical thinking, which I was inspired to write after skimming an article in SCIENCE.

Politically speaking, the article, Technology and Informal Education: What Is Taught, What Is Learned, serves my purposes (my purposes being: I'd like my district to stop buying SMART Boards and start assigning lots of good books for homework). But even on a skim-through, I found problems.

Greenfield's most interesting claim, which I believe until I learn otherwise, concerns the famous rise in IQ scores:

In the midst of much press about the decreasing use of the print medium and failing schools, a countervailing trend may come as a surprise: the continuing global rise in IQ performance over more than 100 years. This rise, known as the Flynn effect, is concentrated in nonverbal IQ performance (mainly tested through visual tests) but has also occurred, albeit to a lesser extent, in verbal IQ (1-5).... Increasing levels of formal education and urbanization were particularly important [as causes of the rise in IQ] in the United States and Europe in the first half of the 20th century (9, 10). More recently, technological change may have taken the dominant role. The changing balance of media technologies has led to losses as well as gains. For example, as verbal IQ has risen, verbal SATs have fallen. Paradoxically, omnipresent television may be responsible for the spread of the basic vocabulary (11) that drives verbal IQ scores, while simultaneously the decline in recreational reading may have led to the loss of the more abstract vocabulary driving verbal SAT scores (6, 12, 13).

The changing balance of media technologies has led to losses as well as gains. For example, as verbal IQ has risen, verbal SATs have fallen. Paradoxically, omnipresent television may be responsible for the spread of the basic vocabulary (11) that drives verbal IQ scores, while simultaneously the decline in recreational reading may have led to the loss of the more abstract vocabulary driving verbal SAT scores (6, 12, 13).

Technology and Informal Education: What Is Taught, What Is Learned
by Patricia Greenfield
Science 2 January 2009:
Vol. 323. no. 5910, pp. 69 - 71

In short, it's not "intelligence" that's gone up, it's scores on the visual scales and basic vocabulary.

Verbal intelligence -- that would be the SAT-V kind of intelligence that predicts college success (and, yes, SATs do predict college success) -- is down.

Unfortunately, Greenfield attributes the decline in verbal intelligence to technology, kids, and parents, not schools. Visual media have replaced books at home; therefore kids can't read challenging texts or think because "reading for pleasure" is the key to critical thinking.

So what should the schools do now that kids can't read?

They should stop using books & switch to PowerPoint:

Schools should make more effort to test students using visual media, she said, by asking them to prepare PowerPoint presentations, for example.

"As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know," said Greenfield, who has been using films in her classes since the 1970s.

"By using more visual media, students will process information better," she said.

Talk about the bad becomes normal.

+++++

Number one: I'm aware of no evidence that "reading for pleasure" produces high verbal intelligence scores (though I assume it helps), and I am aware of informal evidence that reading for school is essential.

Number two: you can't teach verbal disciplines by means of pictures. Period. Ed was working on K12 education back when California teachers were attempting to deliver "sheltered instruction" to ELL students. In theory, sheltered instruction involves a number of strategies, but in practice it meant trying to teach language-based disciplines using pictures instead of words. It didn't work.

PLUS, when it comes to PowerPoint, I am as one with Colonel H.R. McMaster (now Brigadier General McMaster):

McMaster is a humanist, with a doctorate in history, who is allergic to the military’s culture of PowerPoint presentations where the jargon and diagrams do the thinking for you. He once told me that if an idea couldn’t be put in paragraph form, it didn’t deserve consideration.

And number three: wtf?

Kids aren't doing any reading outside school so they should do less reading inside school, too?

Gelman is right.

if Abe Lincoln had 21st century skills

from Laura:

the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation

PowerPoint isn't writing

from the June 20 WSJ:

PowerPoint Turns 20

One of the most elegant, most influential and most groaned-about pieces of software in the history of computers is 20 years old. There won't be a lot of birthday celebrations for PowerPoint; the program is one the world loves to mock almost as much as it loves to use.

While PowerPoint has served as the metronome for countless crisp presentations, it has also allowed an endless expanse of dimwit ideas to be dressed up with graphical respectability. And not just in conference rooms, but also in the likes of sixth-grade book reports and at PowerPointSermons.com.

As it happens, what might be called the downside of the culture of PowerPoint is something that bemuses, concerns and occasionally appalls PowerPoint's two creators as much as it does everyone else.

Robert Gaskins was the visionary entrepreneur who in the mid-1980s realized that the huge but largely invisible market for preparing business slides was a perfect match for the coming generation of graphics-oriented computers. Scores of venture capitalists disagreed, insisting that text-based DOS machines would never go away.

With major programming done by Dennis Austin, an old chum, PowerPoint 1.0 for Macs came out in 1987. Later that year, Microsoft bought the company for $14 million, its first acquisition, and three years later a Windows version followed.

Gaskins and Mr. Austin, now 63 and 60, respectively, reflected on PowerPoint's creation and its current omnipresence in an interview last week. They are intensely proud of their technical and strategic successes. But to a striking degree, they aren't the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint. In fact, the best single source of PowerPoint commentary, both pro and con, (including a rich vein of Dilbert cartoons) can be found at RobertGaskins.com, his personal home page.

Perhaps the most scathing criticism comes from the Yale graphics guru Edward Tufte, who says the software "elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch." He even suggested PowerPoint played a role in the Columbia shuttle disaster, as some vital technical news was buried in an otherwise upbeat slide.

No quarrel from Mr. Gaskins: "All the things Tufte says are absolutely true. People often make very bad use of PowerPoint."

Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

Since then, he complains, "a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don't like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work."

One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which is was intended. When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready.

Now grade-school children turn in book reports via PowerPoint. The men call that an abomination. Children, they emphatically agree, need to think and write in complete paragraphs.

Christopher was given a PowerPoint assignment this year in social studies. Next year, at the end of 8th grade, the kids can do one of two projects for their big ELA assignment:

• make a movie (no instruction provided)
• make a slide show (no instruction provided)

That's nothing compared to The Masters School, annual tuition $26,000/year and climbing.

I went to their Open House with a friend to hear the pitch, and they made us sit through a whole, long PowerPoint prsentation their 5th grade class had done.

That was it.

PowerPoint

A PowerPoint presentation made by other people's children. Ed had to tie me down to get me to watch my own kid's PowerPoint presentation; why would I want to watch anyone else's kid's PowerPoint presentation?

answer: I wouldn't.

My friend said, "For $26,000/year they better show me something that will rock my world."

PowerPoint isn't it.


update

I'm pretty sure Public Relations for Dummies says never use PowerPoint.

PRfD is a great, great book.

I read it a few years ago when I needed to write my first press release ever.

Result: my church got a news story in the New York Times, with photo.

[pause]

hmmmm...

Having read the one negative review on Amazon, I think I'm wrong about that.

I bought PRfD, which seemed terrific, but I didn't use it. Let me find the book I did use.

got it!

Writing Effective News Releases...: How to Get Free Publicity for Yourself, Your Business, or Your Organization by Catherine V. McIntyre

fantastic

I'm pretty sure I'm right about PowerPoint & the Dummies book. Yaverbaum says don't use PowerPoint.

I think.





Tufte's tips for a successful presentation
cyber tips from Tufte
ask Tog (Challenger graphics)
21st century skills