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And another reason PowerPoint should be banned

Posted on June 15, 2006 by Mills

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.

2 thoughts on “And another reason PowerPoint should be banned”

  1. Ms Cornelius says:
    June 20, 2006 at 4:02 pm

    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.

  2. Nick Thompson says:
    July 7, 2006 at 9:18 am

    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.

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