Monday, April 4, 2011
PowerPoint is Evil
I do agree with Edward Tufte that powerpoints today are just a downfall to what ever point you are trying to make or whatever information you are trying to get across. Personally I have never been a fan of PowerPoint, it was confusing to me. I do not understand the need for a professor that teaches lectures to just cram thirty some slides with information, sometimes cutesy pictures that go along with the lecture, and all of the various slide templates you can choose from to make the powerpoint look more appealing. In my opinion it doesn't, alot of the time it is somewhat hard to read off the powerpoint because of the colors and the design of the background. It is still boring to listen to a professor read off his/her powerpoint slides the entire lecture, no matter how nice it looks or what fun effects it has, plus it almost makes me think that my professor may not know all of the material they are trying to teach because they do not really add much to the lecture, besides maybe a few side comments/details or examples, they just read the content on the slides, which is alot of times very similar to what is in the book anyways. When professors use powerpoints for lectures, with a majority of the information already on the slides, and post them online it just makes me that much more unmotivated to go to that class because I can just read the lecture from the slides myself.
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YOu write:
ReplyDelete>>alot of the time it is somewhat hard to read off the powerpoint because of the colors and the design of the background. <<
Yes - not enough people consider the color scheme when they craft a power point presentation. Sometimes the text is barely discernible because of the color combinations.
Re: your last point
I agree completely - if a prof doesn't offer much of substance in a class, people aren't motivated to go. When I was an undergrad student, we had bookstores that would sell class notes to various lectures. There are several classes for which I bought the notes that I attended only a few times. Needless to say, I try to do things differently. I don't see much benefit in giving multiple choice tests - all that does is teach you to copy information from one page to another.