New! Researchers at the University of New South Wales, Australia have proven that PowerPoint presentations inhibit learning and understanding. According to Professor John Sweller (here is a link to a pdf file of a newspaper account of the research):
"The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster," Professor Sweller said. "It should be
ditched."
New! Here, Edward Tufte (Tufte of Yale University is the acknowledged world's authority on the graphical presentation of data. His book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is the final world on the subject) explains how PowerPoint caused the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.
Click here to read the article by Edward Tufte describing the inherent flaws in PowerPoint.
Here is a link to an article entitled "Of Powerpoint and Pointlessness" that states, among other things:
"The bells and whistles are also irritating to many educational theorists, who say the program can make a presentation look more polished than it really is.
"One of the criticisms that's been raised about PowerPoint is that it can give the illusion of coherence and content when there really isn't very much coherence or content," said Edward Miller, an education researcher and board member of the Alliance for Childhood...To critics, PowerPoint serves largely the same role in the classroom as pre-processed snack food does in the lunchroom: a conveniently packaged morsel that looks good but doesn't match the intellectual or corporeal nourishment of, say, a critical essay or a plate of steamed spinach."
Another article entitled "The PowerPoint Amateur Hour" includes the following:
"It's the way people depend on all those bells and whistles that come with the software to try to shore up a weak presentation."
The PowerPoint backlash .... appears to have begun in earnest last year when Sun CEO Scott McNealy purged his company's PowerPoint files. "We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network," McNealy told the San Jose Mercury News. "We've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint."
Last Updated Thursday, April 5, 2007 18:48