Is PowerPoint an effective learning tool?

An article in The Sydney Morning Herald (4 April, 2007) quotes Professor John Sweller, University of NSW, as saying PowerPoint has been a disaster as a learning tool and should be ditched.

John Sweller, who has developed a 'cognitive load theory' about how much information we can handle at once in our working memory, is reported as saying:

"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

Are Microsoft's templates the best?
I am not a great fan of PowerPoint as it is so often badly used (too much information on each slide, poorly proofread etc.). In my opinion, the best presentations are largely visual.
Researcher Michael Alley maintains PowerPoint's default design (short headings followed by a bulleted list) is partly to blame for poor presentations.

He advocates a design which features a sentence heading supported by visual evidence and minimal words. You can view his preferred design at http://www.writing.eng.vt.edu/speaking/rethinking_psu.pdf

Gettysburg speech as a PowerPoint presentation
And if, like me, you missed the Gettysburg speech in PowerPoint when it did its viral rounds a few years ago, you can still be entertained at http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

Labels: business writing, PowerPoint

posted by Unknown @ 9:06 PM