It's About Learning

Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com via kwout

In the New York Times article We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint Elisabeth Bummiller points to a series of articles and exchanges with Military leaders that show that the use of PowerPoint as a significant internal threat. Gen. James N. Mattis explicitly states that:

PowerPoint makes us stupid

Similarly General McMaster said in a telephone interview:

It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control…Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.

Perhaps the most telling tidbit from the article is the notion that:

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters. The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

This isn’t the first or last article dealing with the challenges of PowerPoint. There is even a Wikipedia entry for Death by PowerPoint and the following youtube video by Don McMillian Life After Death by Powerpoint 2010 that point to the fact that most people use PowerPoint wrong.

[youtube]KbSPPFYxx3o[/youtube]

So if PowerPoint presentations are so poor or ineffective then why are we still using them in our classrooms, boardrooms other venues. Alexi Kapterev offers a Death by PowerPoint presentation via slideshare.net that attempts to answer this question. Kapterev argues that bad or ineffective PowerPoint is due to a lack of:

• Significance
• Structure
• Simplicity
• Rehearsal

I find it interesting that we keep on coming back to problem with significance or a lack of significance and am reminded of the Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance post in which I point to Micheal Wesch’s article with he same title. We will we (the academy) learn.