It seems that blaming PowerPoint for boring or outright bad presentations is still popular. That’s bad enough. What’s worse, is that people think that using some other tool will make things better.
You know what? It’s NOT the tool. Sure there are some newer tools that offer more, or at least different bells and whistles. Part of the problem with that is that people seem to think the bells and whistles, in and of themselves, make things better. These are the same people who practically had to be threatened with bodily harm before they would stop using that “whoosh” sound for their slide transitions. They are also the same people who still use blinking text on their websites.
I won’t go through the usual laundry list of PowerPoint alternatives, but I will say that if you don’t have a good sense for how to use a tool, it doesn’t matter how good your tool is, the result won’t be much good. I’ve seen this already WAY too many times: the audience is told that the speaker is NOT going to use PowerPoint; instead, they are going to use one of the (cool, new) Web 2.0, or Cloud Tools. (Note that the ‘cool’ and ‘new’ is silent, but they are there nonetheless.) Then they launch into their Prezi talk, which consists of a bunch of rectangular frames arranged in neat rows and columns which the speaker proceeds to zoom in on one after the other. TA-DA! Prezi talk. Only it’s not. It’s still a slide after slide talk, only now, the audience has the added annoyance of having to put up with the speaker zooming in to each slide. Sometimes they are perceptive enough not to arrange their talk as a series of slides; sometimes they place them randomly. This often has the effect of causing the speaker to stumble around while (s)he searches for the next slide in the mess.
C’mon folks. I’d hate to think people are really that thick. A presentation is a performance. YOU are the star of this particular show. Whatever you put on the screen, HOWEVER you put it there, is there to SUPPORT your performance.
This sums it up quite nicely:
I wonder if the PPT ‘standard’ became entrenched back when people were converting from overhead slides? Or maybe it happened when we were converting from the blackboard to overheads. First, people simply moved their blackboard presentations onto the overhead. Other than people who crouched over the projector, talking to it rather than the audience, it wasn’t too bad. Later, people could prepare stuff on their computers and print it onto slides (but with poor quality and without colour mostly). At that point we lost the communicative aspect of doing it on the fly.
It is a performance, but sometimes the slides do matter, when the information to be conveyed is easier to convey pictorially than verbally.
Prezi is worse than Powerpoint for distracting from the content, and simpler slides are nearly always better.
Powerpoint is a poor tool in several ways, particularly as its default options lead novices into particularly bad font, color, and layout choices.
I agree. The slides can be an essential part of the talk.
It could also be that most people just aren’t very good at doing presentations, no matter what tool they have. It’s not like we take the time to actually teach people how to do them. First off, you’d need someone who’s actually good at doing presentations to teach people how. That eliminates 80-90% of all university instructors – including those in Education.