PowerPoint ban

An article in The Conversation suggest that PowerPoint presentations are not sufficiently flexible for lectures.

Let’s ban PowerPoint in lectures – it makes students more stupid and professors more boring

There are a host of possible reasons for a lecture going wrong: a badly planned course, inadequate preparation, feeling uninspired on the day, disengaged students, a crowd that’s too big, a poorly designed auditorium. To this bulleted list of catastrophes comes PowerPoint.

I have designed a number of PowerPoint presentations and recall sitting through quite a few more, but ten years on I don’t remember the content of a single one. Long term impact – zero. Transparencies and overhead projectors were worse though. 

The article attracted some interesting comments. I like this one from Hugh McLachlan, Professor of Applied Philosophy, Glasgow Caledonian University.

This is a very good article. I agree strongly with it. Lectures should be, at the very least, performances. PowerPoint tends to come between the performer and the audience. Powerpoint is more suited to presentations where, for instance, someone is trying to sell insurance and wants to make some specified points. A lecture should be an engagement between the lecturer and the audience. Switch the machinery off before you start the lecture. The students will be grateful.

Education is more akin to show business than it is to the sale of insurance policies – or it should be.