We were talking today, again, about that recurrent concern over the reliance on PowerPoint for presenting complex concepts or sharing knowledge. I recently read Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence and the second edition of his powerful PowerPoint essay is quoted in the title of this post.
It’s a perpetual teaching/learning issue. Not only is PP increasingly relied upon to support lecture, but more students are required to submit their course work in this format.
Some questions that I feel are worth asking are, Do bullet points and pictures inspire or require smart and rigorous thinking? How much of the blame for bad (i.e., diminishing, boring, soporific, flattening…) PowerPoint presentations lies with the user and how much with the tool?
Read more on Edward Tufte’s blog.