PowerPoint

PowerPoint

No writing for this week, but please read the following to prepare for class and discussion:

• [PowerPointIsEvil], Tufte (handout)

• [Absolute PowerPoint], Parker. (hadnout) "'Powerpoint gives you the outcome, but it removes the process.'" It "risks squeezing out the provider of the process - that is to say, the rhetorician, the storyteller, the poet, the person whose thoughts cannot be arranged in the shape of an AutoContent?? slide."

• [PowerPoint No, Cyberspace Yes], Creed. (handout)

• [PowerPoint is Not Evil], Rocklin. A response to Creed. "Given these complexities, it does not make much sense to talk about the pedagogical value of a particular technology. Instead, I think we are better off asking what pedagogically useful things we can do with a particular technology." At issue is how the technology shapes pedagogy. (handout)

On the evening of class, I'll hand out two pages on designing PP presentations

• [Designing Guidelines for Creating a Quality Power Point Presentation] (I think they mean Design Guidelines for Creating a Quality Power Point Presentation, or just Guidelines for Creating a Quality Power Point Presentation.)
• [Creating a Great Presentation]. A PP on creating PP. It's fun to guess what the writer might have said during some of these slides.

The general argument is this:

In slideware such as PowerPoint, the constraints (technical and social) on presentation influence the writing process all the way back to invention. That is, using PP "elevates format over content" (Tufte). For instance, the limits of reading a screen display constrains writing to a set of bullet points: no more than 6 words per bullet, 6 bullets per slide, and 6 word slides in a row. After a while, the constraint becomes a stylistic (and so a social) commandment: Keep it short and simple, easily digestible - but in turn give up development and even the need for development. The software doesn't permit development, anyway.

From another angle, writing PP is writing a 5 paragraph theme: An intro, 3 bullet points, and an outro, with content narrowed to that which will fit the pre-existing (social, stylistic) strictures of the presentation, shoehorning content into a set number of words and slides by formula. Some argue this is no big deal; we're simply teaching the conventions of Effective Presentation. Others argue that when writing is reduced to writing-as-presentation, the bullet-point constraints of PP become naturalized as a habit of thought, a way of thinking, a cognitive style. Tufte (google: tufte) mentions this shift up in his brief consideration of PP, PowerPoint is Evil.

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our classrooms. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. [PowerPointIsEvil]

The problem as Tufte defines it is lack of content and expository development:

Elementary school PowerPoint exercises ... typically consist of 10 - 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides - a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work.

Tufte, taking an epistemic approach to reading and writing, connects the rhetorical style embodied in and encouraged by PP to a cognitive style. With PP, as with any writing, we represent a mind at work on a problem; and in PP that mind works in short clips of fragmented statements. In doing PP, then, we take on a particular way of thinking.

If you're interested, Tufte this up in detail in his in-depth consideration of the use of PP, ''The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint."

Let's test the argument

That is, let's work with the idea that PowerPoint is not a neutral technology but one that teaches not just a writing style but a cognitive style. We'll have a class session in which we explore the validity of the argument that PowerPoint shapes understanding.

Come prepared to work in threes to create and present a PP lecture on a topic that I assign.

PowerPointClass