Saturday, August 12, 2006

The Devil's Playground

Ah, now here is a meme worth supporting: PowerPoint is the work of the devil. It's part of the great MBA takeover. Time was you could pick a guy as from the business school if he showed up with his laptop and started flashing slides but no, these days everybody does it and it can only get worse (or maybe it has gotten worse, and nobody has told me--is there a PowerPoint novel?). These days, I see "teaching evaluation forms" (so-called) that rate and rank on "effective use of PowerPoint." PhD programs should issue the stuff to grad students going on the job market, as part of a survival kit.

None of this is remotely new. Edward Tufte deserves recognition as one loud and coherent critic of PowerPoint. Wiki includes a useful summary of the critiques of Tufte and others, in an instructive general account of the whole PowerPoint phenomenon--noting, perhaps most tellingly,"its use to guide and reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience."

I try to resist this stuff, but the ocean rolls over me. At least when I do put together a PowerPoint presentation, I try to make sure that every third bullet point says: Jennifer Lopez, please call Buce.

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