Powerpoints are evil! Just look at this one about Gettysburg.

I can’t tell if Mr. Tufte is being funny with his article or not, and if he’s not then I feel he’s certainly over-exaggerating.

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. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

No class I’ve ever taken has taught me to do things this way. If I were to make slides, it was only to emphasize a point I’d made. We always wrote papers and then also made powerpoints or had general talks about our topic. What child, no matter the age, would -actually- read through all of their classmates’ papers? I don’t think I know any who would, and maybe that’s the point the author’s trying to make… powerpoint is helping diminish an already declining attention span of people of all ages.

But if that’s the argument, making schooling have more a point (ahahaha… haha…), then I think the focus should be on forcing kids to learn how to read and write better in the first place, because a lot of them can’t do that even when they reach college age. Oh, and they should probably focus more on NOT cutting cursive out of the curriculum.

I don’t know where Mr. Tufte has viewed most of his powerpoints, but he must be working in the wrong field. Where I work the powerpoint presentation still just helps pad the oral presentation and doesn’t at all replace it. If it DID replace it, people would just take a look at the powerpoint we’re sent in advance and not attend the meetings, but everyone still attends the meetings because they know the powerpoint doesn’t describe everything they need to know in depth.

I think powerpoints are a great way to help make a presentation make more sense to its audience, but it needs to be done in the right way. Choosing the right colors, designs, and other enhancers to keep peoples’ attention without overdoing it, making sure you haven’t put too much or too little on each slide, yada yada yada… Seems like Mr. Tufte has mostly ever viewed terrible powerpoints (like the one about Gettysburg also assigned for this week, but that’s obviously “haha” funny and meant to be ironic), but that sounds more like a personal problem to me. I’ve viewed some terrible ones in my day, but I’ve viewed enough really good ones to realize that they’re a useful tool to today’s society.