The Big Question on the Learning Circuits blog this month is ...

PowerPoint - What is Appropriate, When and Why?

Link to The Big Question

The question follows some research by Professor John Weller that has been recently discussed in the media. Professor Weller is an expert in cognitive load theory and has been quoted as saying "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster". His reason being that "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."

So there was much talk in the press about 'the death of PowerPoint' and how the professor was suggesting that it wasn't an effective tool. However, as usual, the press leap to the most newsworthy headline, not necessarily the proper explanation. Professor Weller wasn't saying PowerPoint was bad, he was saying that it was badly used.

Over the years, PowerPoint has been horribly abused. Some of the reason for that is the user interface which makes it easy to create very poor, inneffective slides with lots of bullets, words and rubbish clip art. It isn't as easy to create powerfull visual aids using PowerPoint, but it is possible and is by no means difficult.

PowerPoint should be used just like any other visual aid. I very often hear people talking about putting a presentation together when all they are doing is creating the PowerPoint slides. They miss the point: the slides aren't the presentation, they're to support the presentation. A visual aid doesn't have masses of writing, and it isn't the main focus of attention. It merely helps the audience to understand the main points better and retain informaltion more effectively.

So, some general rules for any visual aid (please note that I'm not a fan of hard and fast rules so these are more like guidelines):

  • Images, graphs and photo's should be relevant and help the audience to
    understand the message. If they don't do that, they shouldn't be in the
    visual aid.
  • Images, graphs and photo's should look professional or, at the very
    least, bespoke (it's sometimes nice to have a photo you've taken yourself
    or a diagram you've created
  • No clip art.
  • Keep the word count to a minimum, any more than six and you should
    seriously consider whether you need them all. Words are for handouts.
  • If there are any animations, fancy transitions or sound effects
    ask yourself: does this help get my message across. If it doesn't
    exemplify a point, don't use it.
One more though on PowerPoint. Many news stories have predicted the death of PowerPoint for a wide range of reasons. Recently, Google announced that it was launching a web based presentation application to join its Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets applications. If it's any good, it really could be the death of PowerPoint.