Thoughts on Using PowerPoint

When most people think of learning how to use PowerPoint, they want to learn about how to use it with a “bang,” how to make people marvel at their ability to do the fancy things, almost as if their presentation is about the coolness and spectacle of advanced PowerPoint rather than whatever it is they are actually there to talk about (of course, no one in the audience will know what is being said because of being so distracted by the bangs…).

My take on PowerPoint, however, is a bit different. I believe that PowerPoint is a tool that should be used to help keep your lecture or presentation on track, both to you as teacher and to your students. Presentations should be straightforward and simple with as few bells and whistles as are necessary to communicate your message. Beyond that, the bells and whistles are at best distracting and are, more commonly, annoying.

PowerPoint is just a tool. It won’t magically make you a better teacher. And if you get too caught up in its bells and whistles, it could well make you worse.

There are several drawbacks to PowerPoint, and I’d like to briefly discuss one of those here (I will discuss the others at a later date).

The first drawback of using PowerPoint is what I like to call “PowerPointization.” This phenomenon first pervaded the business culture around ten years ago, and now it is taking over academia. It is the tendency to reduce everything to bulleted points. Of course, that is probably a good thing for advertizing, but in academia, we are supposed to value the complexity, the wonder, the nuance of knowledge and ideas. But our students (and often our administrators) want things in bullets so that they can read them quickly, just get to the main “point.”

The problem is that very little in the real world that is worth teaching or learning at or above the college level is fixed or objective or reducible to bulleted lists or translatable to PowerPoint. Yet we do it every day in our classes because this little software tool practically forces us to do it.

One of the best takes on this phenomenon was done several years ago by Peter Norvig, who took the liberty of putting “The Gettysburg Address” into PowerPoint. Norvig also has a nice companion essay about the making of the presentation that is well worth reading.