PowerPoint article notes

What is good PowerPoint design? by Garr Reynolds

• context matters

how the visual is placed and with what context is of paramount concern

• Simple but not simplistic

simple is easier to understand
simple means greater clarity

• visual makeover

powerpoint backgrounds are overused

3d is bad for clear information

declarative sentence is better than title
pie charts are good for displaying simple information
if the PP is on simple subject simple slides are good but for technical presentations slides with of info might be good

PowerPoint Debate #3

The first article is by Garr Reynolds and is titled "The Sound of One Room Napping". His first point is conference organizers often try to create an average PowerPoint and risk having a bad presentation that is different than most. He also talks about how these PowerPoints are typical and are not enough to make an impact because facts presented in bullet points are not enough to make that desired impact. Another bad thing most people do when using PowerPoint is having "slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts [which] makes for bad visuals and bad documentation."

The second article is by Cliff Atkinson and is titled "A Broken Powerpoint Culture". Atkinson first talks about how a PowerPoint may may have contributed to the space shuttle Coumbia's crash. He also syas that teachers are finding that instead of PowerPoint keeping interest in the classroom i tinstead puts students to sleep and companies are finding that PowerPoint is hindering them with finance presentations. If PowerPoint is used badly it can lead to "lost productivity, diminished creativity and evaporating intellectual assets."

The last article is also written by Cliff Atkinson and is titled "Bullet Points Kill (Effective Communication)". He starts with a really good point that bullet points effectively condense lots of information but in a PowerPoint the slides should be a visual aid not condensed information. He says that in a Microsoft Word Document you use portrait orientation which is good for putting lots of information in easy to read columns. However PowerPoint is in landscape orientation which like a TV is useful for pictures and visual objects. Bullet points do not make PowerPoint easier to understand it makes it harder to absorb.

PowerPoint Debate #2

In Tom Creed's article titled "PowerPoint No, Cyberspace Yes" he lists more reasons why PowerPoint is not a useful teaching tool; similar to Edward Tufte's recent article "PowerPoint is Evil". His article is mainly about electronic communication (email, electronic conferencing) versus PowerPoint and which is more useful for helping students learn in the classroom. Some of his reasoning is that electronic conferencing is student centered and student controlled. PowerPoint however is the exact opposite; it is teacher centered and controlled. The main idea in his article is explained in this quote,"Using PowerPoint in the classroom doesn't necessarily make you a bad person. It does, however, mean that your emphasis is on the quality of your presentation rather than your students' learning." As you can see, his ideas are very similar to those of Edward Tufte.

David Byrne has different ideas of PowerPoint and its applications in his article titled "Learning to love PowerPoint". He describes his experiences of using PowerPoint and how he was not very impressed with it at first. He describes PowerPoint as "found it limiting, inflexible, and biased, like most software." However, Byrne started to use PowerPoint more often and found it useful to create things in more an artistic view. Almost to create works of art more so than a normal slide show. To quote him in how he describes his works: "I discovered that even without text, I could make works that were "about" something, something beyond themselves, and that they could even have emotional resonance."

Powerpoint Debate #1

In Edward Tufte's article titled "PowerPoint is Evil" he describes why and how PowerPoint is evil. In his first example about PowerPoint he compares it to a drug that promised to make people beautiful but in fact had serious side effects, inducing stupidity, making people bores, wasting time, etc. He then goes on to complain that PowerPoint is everywhere and has turned all speakers/lecturers into people that "elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch". Tufte also says that PowerPoint replaces writing reports in school and instead teaches them how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. His final stab at PowerPoint is how it makes charts. To quote him "Applying the PowerPoint templates to this nice, straightforward table yields an analytical disaster".

However Tom Rocklin counters this idea with his article titled "PowerPoint is not evil". He first talks about his own reaction when he read the article saying he was shocked at this revelation and then became angry that he was the kind of teacher that was put in the category that "elevates format over content". Rocklin then goes on to list why PowerPoint is not evil and that it is simply an easy and useful commodity to teaching. He compares it to having a printer in that rather than writing a quiz on a marker board you simply print off the quiz with the printer. He then lists an example of a perfectly normal good teacher who uses PowerPoint and explains why. Simply put, it is an easy, useful piece of technology used to help share information. Rocklin then explains that this teacher does not "elevate format over content" and in fact PowerPoint helps him to teach better.