This is a draft of a presentation drawing upon an a New Yorker article about the epistemology of Powerpoint. Essentially, this is a warning about Powerpoint.

1. Reasons to Avoid
Presentation Software
Dangerous Visual Compulsions

2. Opportunities

3. or Compulsions?

4. Opportunity vs. Compulsion
 “The opportunities to produce further
and further ‘generations’ of
contrivances are indistinguishable from
the compulsions to do so.”
(Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward
History, p. 396.)

5. A Few Worries about
Powerpoint-style
 Why I worry about using powerpoint or similar
methods of pedagogy in classes.
 Not why EVERYONE should worry

7. Remember “conversations”?
Before there were presentations,
there were conversations, which
were a little like presentations but
used fewer bullet points, and no one
had to dim the lights.

8. Powerpoint conditions us to
"deliver content"
 helps you make a case,
 but it also
 makes its own case:
about how to organize information,
how much information to organize,
how to look at the world.

9. Conditions Users’ Frame
Shepherds users toward
a staccato,
summarizing
...frame of mind.

10. Bad Result: Distances
presenter from audience
Instead of human contact, we are given human
display.
BUT:
 Real conversations involve give and take to
arrive at a new answer.
 Powerpoint encourages us to present to each
other, instead of taking risks and engaging.

11. Bad Result : Wastes Prep
Time with formatting
Talented and highly paid people spend hours formatting
slides
 Rather than concentrating on what to say.
Imagine: 100, 000 professors and executives pondering:
 Arial? Times Roman?
 Twenty-four point? Eighteen point?’

12. Disguises or hides logical
flaws

13. Disguises or hides logical
flaws

14. Information Conveyor
Professor Clifford Nass at Stanford:
For the student...
PowerPoint “lowers the ceiling”

15. What the student loses
 "What you miss is the process. The classes I
remember most, the professors I remember
most, were the ones where you could watch
how they thought. You don’t remember what
they said, the details. It was ‘What an elegant
way to wrap around a problem!’
 PowerPoint takes that away. PowerPoint gives
you the outcome, but it removes the process.”

16. What the professor loses
 Nass: As a professor, “What I miss is, when I used to
lecture without PowerPoint, every now and then I’d
get a cool idea...[and] I just went for it —twenty-five
minutes. And to this day students who were in that
class remember it.
 Now, that couldn’t happen because students will ask:
 ‘Where the hell is the slide?’

17. Information is not all
Professors can and ought to be:
rhetoricians
storytellers
poets
as well as "content providers."

18. In other words
“Expertise” must be...
...an adjective which applies
to a whole range of abilities

19. Lesson: Let’s be Careful
out there!