I’ve only been teaching at the college level for a few terms. One of the chief complaints I hear from students about PowerPoint lectures (from other instructors!) is the unbearable boredom when a professor uses the pre-packaged presentations included with the course textbook. These CDs contain mostly bullet-point outlines of the entire book.
Yes, you read that right. Bullet-point outlines of an entire textbook.
Professors read this mess for an hour or two. In front of their classes!
Unbelievable!
With all we know about learning and cognitive function, you’d think that professors — dedicated to a career of imparting knowledge — might spend a minute or two understanding that this approach doesn’t help students understand course material. You’d think that textbook publishers — also dedicated to the art of imparting knowledge — might actually read a book or ten about brain function.
PowerPoint expert Ellen Finkelstein poses an excellent question in her LinkedIn group, Great Communicators! Effective Presenting & PowerPoint. Ellen asks,
With so much information about good presentation techniques available, why are there so many Death by PowerPoint presentations given every single day?
Great question, Ellen. You can read some of the answers on her LinkedIn Group… and chime in with your own answers, too.
If you’ve ever experienced a bullet-point textbook presentation, you might enjoy this classic video on YouTube that parodies the horror. Wait for the Q&A session near the end — classic.
Enjoy!
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Some of the graphics in the Chicken (3) video are hard to see. You can read the almost content-free manuscript here: http://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf
Use images that are universally understood.
Mind Mapping is a great technique for doing this. See more here:
http://www.mastermindmapper.com/
Thanks for the Post!
It’s a conspiracy of laziness and lack of resources. The text book publishers “help” lecturers by providing the slides, but don’t care enough, or have the resources, to create good slides.
Effective slides take time to produce – and for some reason no publisher seems to have been brave enough to bite-the-bullet and spend money on gaining competitive advantage by putting together excellent slides. It would take investment – but then surely that investment would lead to higher sales? Or maybe text book decisions aren’t actually made on how effective they are, and so there’s no point investing in better slides for lecturers to use?
The sad thing is that slides to accompany text books give a badge of respectability to awful material – legitimising poor decisions on the part of educators.
We wrote an article about this a while back looking at why academics make these mistakes, and what they should do instead. It doesn’t seem like anything has changed since we wrote this –
http://www.m62.net/presentation-theory/presentation-best-practice/powerpoint-in-education-academic-presentations/
I hope you find it interesting.
Hi Joby:
Thanks for sharing your article. Well done.
I’m continually amazed at how little effort many teachers put into the act of teaching. Astounding.
What’s the cure for this epidemic?
Some years ago, I worked out how much boring presentations were costing the British economy each year. The answer came out at £7.8 billion a year – an underestimate, because it didn’t take into account the amount of time speakers had spent preparing the slides, venue hire, travel & subsistence costs of the unfortunate audiences, etc. – see http://bit.ly/cb3FQv
Even more worrying is the potentially disastrous impact PPt is having on education throughout the world – which, here in the UK, goes far beyond the damage being done in universities. The most depressing news I’ve heard recently was that our local primary school (for 5-11 year olds) now teaches PowerPoint to its pupils!
I think the whole thing is a terrible disaster, born of technological accidents that effectively destroyed the age-old (and very effective) art of ‘chalk and talk’ – on which more at http://bit.ly/bhqql, and by typing ‘chalk and talk’ into the search box on my blog, or by reading Chapters 4-5 of my book ‘Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches and Presentations’ (Amazon USA: http://amzn.to/9c5gym Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/cxZ3SF
As a professor I would have loved being offended by the post… Sadly, however, it is so spot on that I cannot possibly be
At least part of the problem is the way that professors are typically measured. Most professors do not get measured in any significant way on their teaching, but majorly on research outputs. Therefore promotion, raises (or in systems where tenure needs to be earned, tenure) is linked to research. Now where would you concentrate your efforts, considering your incentives?
Clearly there are some that teach because of their love to share knowledge, to empower, and not to create new knowledge. And (un)fortunately their is a supply of students who learn despite the teaching that they receive, so the supply of postgrad research students stay reasonably alive…
Of course, many professors may be excellent researchers, but that does not mean that they are any good at presenting their research… you should go to academic conferences – considering that that is suppose to be their passion, the presentation quality is way too often downright shocking.
I’ve recently blogged about the lecturers being at students service… http://wp.me/pq60j-8g ;also that all presentations, even lectures are sales presentations http://wp.me/pq60j-7x and that lecturers should ask themselves what kind of teacher they are http://wp.me/pq60j-72
Some professors do try… but way too many don’t…
So my cure for the epidemic: change the incentive schemes…
The most confusing part about the “death by powerpoint” phenomenon is that it is well-known now and yet still so many people still follow the “death by powerpoint” formats – what will it take to get people to shake off this habit?
Bullet-points powerpoint! A challenge for all presenters will be to completely abandon bullet points in the slides. Have a look at Steve Job’s presentations. No bullet-points at all.