Worth a Thousand Words?

by Linda Stine

This week—when I wasn’t stuck on snow- and ice-covered highways or shoveling said snow and ice out of my driveway—I have been putting together a lesson for one of my classes on how to create effective PowerPoint presentations. Up till now, I had always focused mainly on getting students to stop putting whole paragraphs of text onto their slides and then simply reading them to the audience during their oral presentations. “We can all read,” I reminded them.  “Use bullet points.”

Imagine my confusion, then, when I read an article entitled “Improve Your PowerPoints” and got to this section:

The good news is that 90% of the problem can be solved by following one simple rule: No bullet points. Reread the rule again (and again, and again) to make sure that it sinks in. Bullet points are the primary source of Death by PowerPoint. Bullet points are basically ugly wallpaper thrown up behind the presenter that end up distracting and confusing the audience. The audience is getting a message in two competing channels running at different speeds, voice and visual. It's a bit like listening to a song being played at two speeds at once. The audience member is forced to ask themselves: Do I listen to the presenter (which is running at one speed), or read the bullet points (which I read at a different speed)?

The author, John Orlando, argues that the main role of a PowerPoint slide should be to present a visual that focuses audience attention on your main issue.  This is true, he argues, not only for an oral presentation but also for a PowerPoint posted on the web.   He recommends software like Jing (see Bill Donohue’s earlier blog on this topic) or Audacity to explain the content of the presentation while the audience is looking at visuals—not written words—that reinforce the main points of that content.

What do you think?  What advice do you give to your students about making effective presentations?  Do you use PowerPoints in your own class presentations, whether face-to-face or online?  What, for you, makes an effective PowerPoint?  Do those bullets really cause death by PowerPoint? 

Problem-Solving Leading to Self-Renewal and Change

Guest Blogger: Dana Flint

Thank you for the opportunity to share some thoughts with you.

Not long before his tragic death in 1951, Albert Barnes sent a couple of pages of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (pp. 177-178 of the 1916 edition, if you want to know) to his good friend Horace Mann Bond. Those pages emphasized the central role of thinking as problem-solving, and highlighted some educational emphases that Barnes hoped Lincoln would adopt. He highlighted the now familiar problem-solving steps of an initial sense of a problem, observation and investigation of factors, construction of solutions, hypotheses, and conclusions, and testing those constructions. In the spirit of Dewey, he understood that this process of problem-solving towards more “intelligent” adjustments (to use Dewey’s term) would be repeated again and again in the constant self-renewal of human living, and, Barnes hoped, in the self-renewal of the educational process at Lincoln. That was then. Nowadays, it seems that this is what we commonly do in our instructional approaches. Here are a few examples from my FYE class this semester:

• I wanted students to come away with a usable skill associated with each subject area in the course, for example, the module on Research. Previously, I brought students to a Library computer lab to receive instruction on searching Library databases. This year I continued in an analogous manner with an in-class demonstration using my laptop and a projector. But somewhere along the line I had a “sense of a problem.” Do students come away from such demonstrations with a usable skill? How could I know? So I got them to define some problems which were of interest to them: abortion, war and technology, global warming, and violence and Grand Theft Auto. Then I showed them a web site that demonstrated the format of annotated bibliographies, and asked them to submit an annotated bibliography, with five varied references, as a demonstration of their skill in doing research. Well, I am still in the process of “testing” (that is, assessing) this solution.
• Second, I thought the usable skill associated with the Speech module would be pretty easy: Let the students make speeches before the class and have another group of students evaluate them. I have done this before, but this semester I got a surprise. Instead of speeches, the students did PowerPoint presentations with the lights out and which ended with a movie, of course. The trouble was that there was a lot more high tech and a lot less speaking. So I went with the flow and found a web site containing a PowerPoint presentation on how to do PowerPoint presentations, and I presented this PowerPoint presentation while instructing the student-judges to critique the PowerPoint presentations of the students, using what they had learned about PowerPoint presentations. This seemed to represent a double process of self-renewal going on at instructional and learning levels.

Am I right in assuming that nowadays we commonly see the process of teaching and learning as a process of facilitating ever more educated adjustments to ourselves and world? Would the “Fitness for Life” course be another such example of this process, or would it not?

PowerPoint in the Classroom

Guest Writer, Dave Royer

PowerPoint – so who has the power and what’s the point? What a great opening this could be if I had a clever answer. But you do get the message that I have chosen to write about PowerPoint, hereafter abbreviated PP. I will give you my perspective and then my students’ multiple perspectives, the latter being the more important as they are the ones who are doing the learning. Based on no reliable or systematic data, I would say that PP is used in more than half the classes at Lincoln, but have we investigated whether it improves student learning, compromises student learning or is neutral? It certainly offers more versatility as to what I can offer in the classroom; I can show pictures, animations, diagrams, figures, etc. that I could never adequately draw on the whiteboard so I feel my lectures are more interesting and engaging. I can go beyond talking about global warming by embedding video of glaciers crashing into the sea in my PP presentation. My students can see the results of extended droughts in sub-Sahara Africa that are more graphic and provocative than my recitation of statistics of rainfall amounts. PP also makes my life easier, and I admit that with some guilt. Nearly every textbook in the sciences comes with a companion website that includes an instructors’ section with a full set of PP lectures. One could simply copy the PP lecture onto a computer or flash drive and present it in the classroom with minimal preparation, and while the quality of these PP lectures varies, most of them are, at the very least, adequate. So even though I routinely edit these PPs by adding, deleting and modifying slides, it is still much easier than preparing a lecture from scratch and thus my guilt. My lectures are being at least partially prepared by a person or team at the publisher with whom I do not need to share my office or my salary. Another advantageous aspect of PP lectures is the ease with which they can be posted to WebCT, where they are accessible to students at any time and from nearly any location.

So what are my concerns about PP lectures? First, I think they contribute to our perennial problem of students not purchasing textbooks; the students feel that the PPs give them all the information that they need to prepare for exams, making the text an unnecessary expense. Second, many of our students have poor note-taking skills, and PPs prevent the development of those skills as students see little or no need to take notes when the PPs will be posted for them.

And for those students who do want to take notes, there is no training available on how to take notes during a PP lecture. My last concern is whether students are learning better, learning more, and developing effective critical thinking skills with PPs, and I have no information or impressions about this.

The second part of the story is what the students think so I took some time with my General Biology II and Microbial Ecology classes to get their thoughts on the subject. I started my classes one day recently by asking whether I should teach with PP or with a traditional write on the board lecture, and more than half voted for the latter. When I asked why, I received a variety of responses. One student stated that if I wrote the information on the board, he would copy it and begin the learning process with the act of writing the information in his notebook. Another said that when I write on the board, it slows things down a bit, and when she copies from the board, it gives her time to think about what is being taught and to come up with questions. She sees PP lectures as going too fast and not allowing for some thoughtful consideration of the material being covered.

Several students thought it was easier to follow the lecture when the instructor wrote on the board, and one student said he was less likely to fall asleep if I wrote on the board; presumably the act of copying something would keep him awake. And many students felt their notes were better when the professor was writing on the board.

As for the students who preferred PP lectures, they cited the ability to include various types of media in the presentation. They also liked that the lectures are available online; the word “convenient” came up several times. Last, they felt that material missed when they could not attend lecture was easily obtained because most faculty post their PPs to WebCT.

In general, the students also noted that the quality of PPs varied considerably from course to course with the worst ones being those that were slide after slide of just text.

So what can be drawn from all of this information? While there are some implicit suggestions above, I invite you, the reader, to share your thoughts, experiences and responses. Barring some new technology, we will be using PP for many years to come.

Last, special thanks to my students in Microbial Ecology and General Biology II for their input on the use of PowerPoints in classes.