« Doing Digital History | Main | Blogging Digital History »
June 15, 2006
And another reason PowerPoint should be banned
Regular readers of this blog know how I feel about PowerPoint. Here's another reason why slideware should be shown the door. The NASA Engineering Safety Commission's 2004 report on the Challenger disaster chided NASA for "PowerPoint engineering" -- that is, over reliance on bullet point presentations that engineers actually learned little from.
And I thought PowerPoint was just bad for students...Who knew it could have calamitous consequences.
Posted by mills at June 15, 2006 03:29 PM
Comments
Funny I was just discussing this over at another website. I personally don't like them because, by their very nature, you can't put enough detail on them.
Posted by: Ms Cornelius at June 20, 2006 04:02 PM
These are criticisms of poorly used Powerpoint rather than Powerpoint as such.
It's not good for showing long snippets of text. So don't use it for that.
I use it for showing the students images -- usually with no more than a caption, and occasionally with a sound-file inserted in the slide.
If you've been around long enough, you'll remember that conference-speakers and lecturers also used to drop slides, fumble with overhead projectors, despair over VCRs and produce bat-like squeals from the classroom hi-fi. Powerpoint, well-deployed, beats them all hands down.
Oh, and you don't come away from it with a chalk-smudged jacket.
Posted by: Nick Thompson at July 7, 2006 09:18 AM