No. 3: On PowerPoint

2004 doesn't seem so long ago. In geologic terms, it isn't any time ago. But something has change in the Ivory Tower.

PowerPoint is in. And I do mean in.

In my entire undergraduate experience, I only had one class that used PowerPoint regularly. This was, interestingly given the figure of speech I just used, my freshman year intro Geology class. At the time, it seemed to me a useful way of clearly getting over the information in a class popularly known as "Rocks For Jocks." It was even a bit novel then. This was in 2000, and PowerPoint, though around, was not the all-consuming rhetorical monster it is now.

Besides that class, I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of PowerPoints I say through for classes. It just wasn't done. At least in the humanities and social sciences, and certainly not at the higher levels.

Well, things have changed.

I have not had a single meeting of any class that has not featured a PowerPoint of some sort, often pushing the 40 slide mark. And these are not all intro classes. I have two upper-level "seminars" (neither of which feature seminar-style seating, but that's another story) that rely heavily upon PowerPoint. And, for the life of me, I can't see how this makes the academic experience better for anyone. In my humble opinion, they enable laziness on everyone's part. If you're the professor, why worry about the lecture? Why deviate? You're already all set. And if you're a student, why take notes? You can print the presentation off the web after class and you're good to go. Note taking skills degrade with the incentive to pay attention.

It's ironic that this drive to "paperlessness" is in fact producing reams of extra printing. I printed a 50 page PowerPoint the other day to catch myself up on a math lecture I missed. If I did that for every class, I'd be pushing a ream myself already. This is regularly done.

But worst of all, it simply destroys public speaking as an art form. Even as recently as undergrad, professors at least made some sort of effort to be engaging. No longer. With PowerPoint, anyone could run a class, more or less, for all the rote repeating the instructors do.

Oh well.