The Pedagogy of PowerPoint
I am catching up on all of the items I flagged for reading over the past week, and I ran across a tremendously well developed paper on Seminar.net about The Rhetoric of PowerPoint. This is a paper by Jens. E. Kjeldsen an associate professor at the University of Bergen, Norway. Kjeldsen rightly points out that technology is not neutral, but rather effects the way we transmit and understand knowledge. I want try to summarize his analysis here, but needless to say he is not very positive about Power Point (although I found the piece to be more fair than some critiques—he does spend time talking about what PowerPoint can do well). This is a long article, longer than most web pieces, but well worth the effort (it is even available for download as a .pdf and he summarizes the article in a flash video). Especially important is the closing remarks where he suggests that we need a Rhetorics of New Media, more than just a literacy.
November 28th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Hi,
Try mind mapping - eg. MindManager.
Mike
January 24th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
[...] As I am writing however I do think of places that a slide would be useful, places where it is far easier to “show†what I mean instead of “tell.†The best example of this would be if I want to talk about a particular painting. Without a slide I would have to describe the composition of the piece, but knowing that the presentation can have images. When I am writing the paper then, I just skip the description part, knowing I am going to add a slide. For the most part I write the piece thinking only of the prose. One of the problems with presentation software is the extent to which it restricts thinking, forcing your presentation into a tidy little box. The only problem is this box is relatively content free in the end. Plug and play presentations are rarely thought provoking. I could add a lot more here, but instead I will merely mention this previous post and direct you to the article it addresses, and finally point to this rather useful example that explains the problem with writing to slides instead of using slide to illustrate a point. (Ohh one more link, this one is to a talk Lessig gave, and it shows how to effectively use slides in a presentation, no images no bullet points, just presentation poetry.) [...]