Last night I gave a short talk on how I integrate GIS in my history research. It was in Ruth Herndon’s Historians in Academia graduate class. Hugo Evans led a terrific discussion on the use of technology in teaching, research, and the profession in general. The last point of the meeting was on the use and abuse of powerpoint (right after my powerpoint-based presentation). Hugo rightly pointed to the pitfalls of powerpoint presentations and the vocal proposals to ditch the slide metaphor entirely.
Interestingly, a number of graduate students were in favor of using the blackboard, or showed interest in emerging presentation technologies such as prezi or devices that capture handwriting and project it on the screen, as a way to circumvent the loathed slide. This is in line with broader criticism of Powerpoint for being “slide-constrained” and “lineal” (see prezi.com), not suitable for kinetic learners (is that static?), and conducive to passive (instead of active) learning.
More guided by a spirit of debate than the apology of a proprietary technology owned by our most beloved software corporation, I present here a few points in favor of using powerpoint, and learning how to make an effective use of it, instead of reinventing the wheel.
1) In Five Principles to Avoid Powerpoint Overload, Atkinson equates powerpoint presentations with storytelling. He recommends a story-board approach to Powerpoint, understanding each slide as stages in an argument (the slide as the basic unit of meaning, a sort of topic paragraph), rather than discrete units full of information (all you can dump in the blank space of a slide). I like this idea. Stories are a good way of communicating problems. Slides are linear expositions, sure, but so do narratives. and while we must be conscious of their limits and push the boundaries, they are still an effective way of communication. Most of historical writing, in that sense, is as linear as a powerpoint presentation.
2) Prezi.com offers an alternative form of presentation: a canvas that you can zoom in and out at will. The problem of Prezi is that metaphors work *only* if we’re used to the metaphor. I like the poster format, and for presentations like we had yesterday, they work. Inscribing hieroglyphs on walls are also a terrific way of communication, I can count a lot of interesting teaching and learning properties, but both teacher and students have to share the same conceptual matrix for understanding for learning to be effective. For good or bad, we are more used to slides or to blackboards (everything displayed at the same time) than to zooming things.
3) A lot of the criticism against powerpoint is based on the effectiveness of capturing the attention of the audience in just one presentation. But a course is a different beast. It’s a course, something that happens over time in repeated sessions. You’re not teaching today and want to make impression today. You want to cement practices and structures of acquisition of knowledge, and this happens over time. Using powerpoint today, prezi next week, a webcam of your handwriting three weeks later, then chalkboard is bad practice. (I’ve done that, so I’m talking from experience.) You’re not trying to make the best impression today for having the audience buy your product.
4) I sympathize with the vintage quality of the blackboard. But let’s be mindful of accessibility. If powerpoints use good contrast and large-size fonts, powerpoints are way more accessible than black(white)board with all the contrast, lighting and handscript issues associated to it. To put it in another way: blackboards encourage active learning in the first row, kinetic involvement in the middle rows, and what’s the heck is going on over there at the end of the classroom.
5) And just for the sake of being polemic, let me defend the use of text… Text in a powerpoint must be scant. Yes. But there’s a case for using a bit more text at some points (provided that the accessibility and the slide-as-an-argument conditions are met). Having “subtitles” to your presentation is not too bad from an accessibility point of view. (Being a non-native speaker perhaps makes me extra-aware of accessibility issues related to oral presentations.)
6) There are ways add kinetic and active-learning properties to the hated slide. First and foremost, the presenter has to interact with the presentation (such as Al Gore). Using hands, gestures, knocking on those hard screens we use, etc., is not the same as the kinetic joy of the chalk on the blackboard, but it’s not that bad either. You can also try beforehand if you can erase your marker from the screen (if it’s a hard screen), and interact with the presentation using a marker. Or have students go to the screen and make marks on the screen.
Powerpoint as software is bad in that it defaults to bullet points, uses small text, and encourages flashiness over conceptual substance. Bad software generates bad habits. And that’s a terrible combination when there’s no critical awareness of the work we do and the limitations of the metaphors (or theories) we employ.
But we can work within the slide presentation framework, improve it, and use it to foster learning in our history classes. Because, essentially, we can think of powerpoint presentations as a support to narrative, and if there’s something to be proud of of our profession is how we learned from flawed approaches to narrative and how we learned to to deal with them. Especially in history classes, in which narrative and story telling plays a central role, there’s a case to use powerpoint presentations and improve on them to make them good tools of learning.
