PowerPoint Presentations
I am considering using PowerPoint for my presentation to some business school librarians on Friday. I happened to uncover the June/July American Libraries containing the article End PowerPoint Dependency Now! A former student of the author’s rants against his use of PowerPoint in class. I saw some negative buzz among librarians in the blogosphere about PowerPoint presentations a few days ago.
When I was in library school, I created Web pages for some of my presentations and made them look very similar to PowerPoint slides. The instructor for one of the courses lamblasted those of us who didn’t use PowerPoint for our presentations, even though there really wasn’t much visual difference between what we did and what our classmates who used PowerPoint did. Thinking about that and the recent complaints about PowerPoint has me snickering.
It seems that the American Libraries article is more about someone’s presentation style than their use of PowerPoint. Maybe I’ll ignore it. Or, gee, since my presentation is about blogging, maybe I should put it on my blog.
June 23rd, 2004 at 2:09 pm
Powerpoint isn’t inherently evil, but the here’s-my-slide-notes-for-me-to-read-out-loud-to-you approach that it supports is. A good rule of thumb for Powerpoint is to use it as little as possible — a single slide should match at least 3 minutes of explanation. And it’s OK to put the slides on hold if you have a better way to explain something. For a good thrashing, see Edward Tufte’s article “Power Corrupts; Powerpoint Corrupts Absolutely” in Wired and probably all over the web.
June 23rd, 2004 at 7:01 pm
Gee, Shimon, I didn’t realize you read American Libraries. That’s exactly what the article said. = )