
PowerPointless: Digital slideshows are the scourge of higher education - tokenadult
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/03/powerpoint_in_higher_education_is_ruining_teaching.html
======
kazagistar
I was totally with this presentation until the very end. "Don't put your
slides/notes online, or people won't have to attend class, and that would be
BAD."

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.

~~~
ronaldx
I got a bit less far than that.

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.

~~~
bostik
> _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._

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.

~~~
ronaldx
My suggestion is the same: obfuscating what's in the exam does not benefit the
students but makes yourself seem more important to their success.

~~~
bostik
That was never my intention.

My goal was to actively discourage all kinds of rote learning, and require
real understanding instead.

------
jimmar
I've taught a few college classes. I've experimented with no slides,
minimalist slides, and text-heavy slides.

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.

~~~
derefr
> 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.

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.

~~~
jimmar
> That way, many of the students will have already read through it once, and
> will be able to ask more thoughtful questions.

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.

~~~
judk
Why are you teaching a class for students who don't want to learn the
material?

------
kyro
I've always preferred being taught with a white/chalkboard. Being able to
follow the professor's every thought, trying to keep 1 step ahead of them by
guessing a solution before it's written out, seeing them make and correct
mistakes in realtime, just being witness to that semi-stream of consciousness,
has proven to be the most effective way for me to learn. Flipping slide-to-
slide and having bucket after bucket of information splashed out on the
screen, perfectly planned and coordinated, makes you a spectator more than a
participant. And preparing slides ahead of time also results in a professor's
tendency to put way more information into a lesson than necessary. This may
apply more to science courses than liberal arts, though.

~~~
japhyr
_seeing them make and correct mistakes in realtime_

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.

~~~
beloch
Some of the best profs I've had made mistakes _deliberately_. Making mistakes
allowed them to point out common pitfalls and engage students by challenging
them to find their mistakes.

~~~
b_emery
I think this is a good illustration of the art of teaching. Getting people to
really engage is difficult.

------
Goladus
Playing devil's advocate for a moment:

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.

~~~
Perseids
> A straightforward lecture delivered directly from a powerpoint is not
> automatically a bad thing.

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](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.

------
mnw21cam
I cannot vote this up enough.

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).

~~~
Goladus
* I was half way through the lesson before someone noticed.*

Were you halfway through before someone noticed or halfway through before
someone decided to say something about it?

------
joelgrus
Please, let's return to the golden age of when I was in college and professors
had to write things illegibly on the chalkboard before just reading them to
us!

~~~
Perseids
In mathematics that is still the preferred method, because (latex beamer)
slides have far to little space to capture all the stuff you want to view in
parallel to e.g. understand a proof. Additionally it forces the lecturer to
slow down the information flow, which is equally important in mathematics.

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.

------
tokenadult
For readers who enjoy the general topic of the trade-offs of communicating
through PowerPoint, the PowerPoint version of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address[1]
by Peter Norvig, LISP hacker who is now Google's director of research, is not
to be missed. Another very interesting discussion of PowerPoint you can find
for free online is "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science"[2] by data visualization
guru Edward Tufte.

[1] [http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/](http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/)

[2] [http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
msg?msg_id=0001yB)

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.

~~~
mistermcgruff
Here's a reponse to Tufte in defense of PowerPoint, which was on HN a few
weeks ago: [http://www.john-foreman.com/1/post/2014/01/defending-
powerpo...](http://www.john-foreman.com/1/post/2014/01/defending-powerpoint-
against-tufte.html)

~~~
nswanberg
What is good about the response? What is new in it? The author has two main
points: 1) that Tufte had information dense slides in his presentations, and
because PowerPoint can be used to show information dense slides, Tufte is
wrong, and 2) that since Steve Jobs had forceful product announcement
presentations with simple slides, and since Tufte likes Apple products, Tufte
is wrong. While I suppose the second point is novel, neither are good.

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.

~~~
mariodiana
Citing Steve Jobs to defend slideshows only makes the case for what's wrong
with slide shows. Jobs' slideshows were only ever a supplement to his
presentation. If you removed the slideshows, the presentation would suffer
somewhat (and only a little, if you ask me). However, if you removed Jobs,
there would be no presentation. His slides were nothing you could review
online later because you missed the live presentation.

------
rjf90
People need to understand that there are different types of powerpoint
presentations. Here are some of the different types of Powerpoints I have
experience with:

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.

------
acadien
Terrible instructors will be terrible in any medium, so the problem isn't with
the medium but the instructors. Great slideshow though, lots of insight for
those of us that do actually care about how we teach.

------
my3681
Reminds me of a story...

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.

------
ericHosick
Some things to think about:

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.

------
codr
An interesting point - but I wish the article wasn't a friggin' Powerpoint
presentation itself.

I assume that is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but still.. is it really necessary?

------
cromulent
I think this Seth Godin PDF on Powerpoint is very good.

"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."

[http://www.sethgodin.com/freeprize/reallybad-1.pdf](http://www.sethgodin.com/freeprize/reallybad-1.pdf)

------
nnq
Their mention of Prezi ([https://prezi.com/](https://prezi.com/)) just
reminded me of it and of when I tried to convince a bunch of people at a
"creative digital media agency" to at least give it a thought, instead of
using powerpoint or slides crafted in photoshop and stitched in a pdf.

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)

~~~
marcoamorales
I'm curious to know why you think it's a _really step forward_ in the
presentation world. All I can think of is that stuff moves around the screen
all around.

~~~
nnq
Yeah, most people use it badly, and the default templates are awful, but its
zooming-in-out style is excellent for mind/knowledge-map based presentation.

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 :(

------
zcarter
Looks like someone there got a hold of Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of
Powerpoint"

[http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint](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."

------
fat0wl
i ran into trouble in a master's programming for going sans powerpoint for a
final presentation. Just dove into code & started showing things, illustrating
concepts & showing classes/methods.

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

------
btbuildem
I'm sorry. I could not get through that slideshow. The medium killed the
message there.

Could this not have been presented better with a few paragraphs of text on an
otherwise blank page?

(seriously.. TL;DR anyone?)

------
Houshalter
I don't get the points about how it's bad to leak information (putting it on
the web, showing things before you say them, giving enough information on the
slideshow that you don't need to listen.) I mean these things might be bad for
other reasons, but if the students don't show up or pay attention, that's on
them. And if you can learn everything from the slideshow alone, well then
great, what's the problem?

------
rossjudson
This whole thing strikes me as a tone-deaf whine from someone who wants more
attention paid to them in lectures.

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.

------
aganders3
There are all kinds of considerations that this doesn't take into account. A
huge part of presenting involves knowing your audience. For just one example,
having text on the slides is very important when you have an audience of mixed
language backgrounds.

------
JeremyMorgan
I couldn't read this critique of slideshows because the slideshow didn't load.

Point taken, sir.

------
dsugarman
I disagree, having slides allowed me to quickly learn all the material, much
faster than if I was actually attending class. This freed up all my time to
get work done and enjoy life in college.

~~~
Perseids
What you would actually want to use in such a case are lecture notes. Or from
a different angle, those slides you used have actually degraded into lecture
notes and are thus necessarily worse as presentation material.

------
hawkharris
Challenge yourself to use fewer than five words on each slide.

Couple that with strong visuals and carefully rehearsed speaking — that's the
way to teach and present.

------
NAFV_P
That slideshow was particularly annoying, more annoying than most slideshows
....

On the other hand it got the message across well, in fact better than most
slideshows.

------
rsobers
For the people playing devil's advocate: why should a college lecture be any
different than a TED talk or conference presentation?

~~~
aganders3
Because it should present the whole story.

------
weinzierl
Which Wittgenstein quote is she referring to on slide 24? I searched a few
quote sites but didn't find anything that would fit.

------
cottonseed
In fact, part of the ivory tower stands unfelled: I don't think I have ever
seen a math lecture or talk using powerpoint.

------
MrQuincle
I didn't get it. Can you explain the slides to me in private?

