Today (4 April, 2007) there is an very interesting article titled “PowerPoint presentations a disaster” on FairfaxDigital at
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/04/03/1175366288359.html
At first I though I was an April fool’s joke but I searched around a bit and recommend you read it.
Professor Sweller from the Education faculty of the University of NSW is quoted as saying “PowerPoint should be ditched”. Professor Sweller developed “cognitive load theory” and believes that when delivering information “it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented." I have not done any research on cognitive load theory or read any of Professor Swellers work but surely Power point as a tool is not the problem but the way it is being utilised in our schools could affect the way students learn. I would be very interested in your comments.
Another particularly interesting quote from the article is “They have also challenged popular teaching methods, suggesting that teachers should focus more on giving students the answers, instead of asking them to solve problems on their own.” Again, I would need to do further research before making a comment but I would be interested in your opinion.
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4 comments:
Joanne, I think PPT can be a useful tool for some learners - those who prefer to have visual aids - I've been reading that today's students are more visual than auditory - partially explaining the uptake of many social software tools. Isn't it better to cater to all the learning styles in a group? I prefer to have visual aids in my personal learning and often catch myself underlining or highlighting key terms or phrases.
It was not a great surprise that the powerpoint can be a bit like the slide show at the neighbours which go on for hours and hours about things which may not interest. I think "interest" is the key. A good powerpoint allows for not only points but diagrams, photos and voice inflexion and an interactive discussion... and a topic which is interesting to the user. I know myself, if I really am interested in something then I want as much input as possible but without interest, nothing will much work.
Bill D
Media scholar Marshall McLuhan made famous the phrase "the medium is the message", by which he meant that the content of a medium is less important than the structure of the medium itself. The content in powerpoint should not be distracting us from how we structure the technology to be really doing. A lecturer or teacher who engages the students with good probing questions and connecting to students' interests and experiences in relation to the content in the ppt presentation is more effective than one who uses lots of multimodal content with powerpoint but not designing effective learning experiences.
I agree with Bill and Liang - it's not so much the PPT that is the problem as the person in control! I've seen both good and bad power points and bad ones are indeed terrible! But good ones can really reinforce the main points and add things of interest, eg images, as long as it doesn't distract from the speaker. Slides that are just chockers with information in particular just draw people's attention away from what is being said.
I like them generally simply because they make you focus a bit more and reinforce what the speaker is talking about.
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