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.
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.
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.