PowerPoint and Learning
I was a participant in a good natured debate as part of the RMIT Learning and Teaching Expo. My partners, Andrea Chester and Anthony Bedford were fantastic. The topic was “The single most effective thing that RMIT could do to improve learning is to ban PowerPoint” and I was on the affirmative team. Most of the speakers were quite humorous but me, in my usual way, wrote something a bit more strident (well, it was a debate). As far as I can tell the main point to come from the negative team was that a) PowerPoint is good when used well, b) to use it well you either need to use it against its intentions/limitations or c) be a designer. I probably agree with all of these and I think that actually makes a case for lecture presentation software that isn’t PowerPoint. For example.
A SCENARIO
Imagine a tool that is actually designed for lectures. It has templates, but these are based on disciplines or even pedagogical models. Do you need text? Graphs? Images? Video? Audio? Formulas? Live URLs? Is this an introductory lecture, a summary? A good lecture has one key point which is explored/discussed in several different ways, what is the key point? What are three ways of exploring this? Examples? And so on. Imagine if you selected that it was a summary of a course, then the program would ask if you needed to be able to see the other slides in the collection (from the other lectures)? Well, yes, of course please. And imagine if it could then help you illustrate, visually, connections and relationships between the key things from each lecture. And it would not require you to be a designer to produce visually intelligent presentations. You should not have to be a graphic designer, an instructional designer and a power user to get good lectures out of your preferred presentation tool. That is not an argument for PowerPoint but for something new.
Ok, below is the text of what I more or less presented as my closing statement for our team. Of course I use Keynote (which is much better to design with than PowerPoint) all the time, but I did take it as an opportunity to sketch an alternative.
“Hello my name is Adrian, and I’m a PowerPointaholic.”
Banning PowerPoint is the single most effective thing RMIT could do to improve learning. Well, that’s a big claim isn’t it? So how could banning such a popular piece of desktop presentation software actually improve learning?
Let me begin with an anecdote. While unrelated to PowerPoint I promise I’ll join it all together by the end.
I have a friend, he’s smart and bright. Studied Public Relations in this very institution, then went on to make an award winning, very philosophical documentary. More recently he’s translated a major work of French philosophy into English for Stanford University Press. Most recently though, he decided he’d like to study medicine. He looked around, online of course, and found that Griffith have a new medical school which revolves around Problem Based Learning and reasonably flexible entry requirements. This is where he decided he wanted to be.
However, for someone with a degree in Public Relations he had to meet some pretty steep science and biology entrance requirements, so he applied himself, thoroughly and diligently, to the study of these using MIT’s Open Courseware. He’s now just finished his first year of medicine.
Now, what’s the point of such an anecdote for PowerPoint and education? Well, not so very long ago you came to university because that was the only way you got access to information, knowledge, a major research library, and disciplinary experts. If you take my own discipline, media studies, as an example, then only 15 years ago if you wanted to make video you had to gain entry to a tertiary course because cameras and edit suites were prohibitively expensive and just too big for home, personal, domestic or even semi professional use. Once you made your masterpiece, it might receive a single screening at an end of year exhibition, and that was that.
Today, most of us have a video camera in our pocket and every one of our computers can be a video edit suite for free. We put our work online and it garners an international audience, in perpetuity.
This means you no longer come to this university to study media because you want access to a camera, edit suite, or a screening. We provide these, but these can no longer be the rationale for our teaching and learning. The same applies across all of our disciplines and this has happened courtesy of that most extraordinary network of networks, the internet.
Now, we have access to international research libraries, experts, courseware, research papers, discussion forums and lists, and so on, all from our own computers. Increasingly, this network is becoming the ‘read write web’ a place where we not only publish and distribute information and knowledge but an actual site of practice. We work, in situ, within the network, creating images, videos, blog posts, and so on that no longer are just for viewing but participate in continuous conversations. For example, a photo I have taken and shared might be used by someone else in their blog, publication, or essay (each of these things has happened). Others might leave comments about my photo, while my photo will also find itself in new sets of albums, surrounded by the work of others, courtesy of the tags that I have used. The same applies for everything we do in this new environment. Our objects are now porous to each other via the network.
Now, and yes I do remember this is meant to be about PowerPoint, I understand learning, at its most fundamental, to be about the ability to make new and novel connections between parts. This is what the read/write web allows. But not PowerPoint.
PowerPoint as a platform, a genre, and a tool, is thoroughly and happily stuck in the twentieth century. Yes, I can include audio, video, images, text, even URLs. But can it understand links in? No, it is closed, shut, mute. This is why we use it in the university, its form mirrors the lecture so comfortably that we don’t have to change anything, question anything about our own practice, in using it. I am an expert. I contain all you need to know within. Face me, hear me, see me. I can talk to you, you cannot talk back to me. With PowerPoint we confuse some basic computer, and perhaps even design literacy, with knowledge consumption. Knowledge, as learning, is not consumed but made. PowerPoint for our students lets them make nothing. It remains mute to all that is outside of its file structure, including what our students might want to say or do with its content.
This argument is not against presentation software, but it is against software that does such a poor job of allowing connections. Whether these connections are from outside of the file, or even internally — for example how do you show, in PowerPoint, that this idea is related to that idea?
This is a twentieth century industrial model where we rely on predesigned templates (any colour as long as it’s black) and confuse visual effects with cognitive consonance. I repeat, of course we all use PowerPoint. Because it reinforces our role as content experts, sources of expertise, and originators of information. It aligns itself perfectly with a pedagogical framework that still sees the lecture as the cornerstone of university learning. But in a world where knowledge objects are now porous to each other, shared, transferable and communicative, where I can make connections which demonstrate knowledge (this is related to this), then in such a world the lecture, and in turn PowerPoint, keep us faithfully looking backwards. Tradition, convention, prestige.
So, banning PowerPoint in itself may achieve very little. However, if PowerPoint were banned and from that a conversation developed around the lecture as a genre, as a particular sort of practice — and I don’t mean ‘how to lecture better’ — then we do have the opportunity to do something that would most effectively improve learning.
