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."
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I think that Jason’s summary is well-written and specific. It includes several details about the two different articles that he has read. Overall, I would have to disagree with Tom Creed’s idea, however. I do not feel that PowerPoint is necessarily “bad”. I think that it is actually very useful for teaching, and that students can retain information easily through it. Plus, PowerPoint could act as more of an advantage to students because it would be easier for them to look at different information through simple bulletin points. PowerPoint is expressed as “artistic, creative, and flexible” by David Byrne, however, and he disagrees with Tom Creed’s thoughts and views of PowerPoint. I think that I agree with David Byrne instead.
Hey man! Good job! The idea that PowerPoint makes the class very "teacher-centered" is absolutely correct! It usually bores everyone to death. No student really enjoys reading all those bullet points, and if they do, it'll probably be really confusing and tough to understand. However, using email would not solve the problem either. Emails will distract the class because everyone would rather check the email they just got from their girlfriend instead of communicating with their teacher about the subject that is being taught. "Learnin to Love" sais PowerPoint presentation does not neccessarily need text. I totally agree with that, and if I were ever to use it for my presentation, I would not use text at all.
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