I'm reading and thinking a lot lately about how the tried & true paradigm of leading group discussion using PowerPoint slides is no longer the best way to communicate with people. I deliver a lot of PPT's as part of my job, so finding a new and more compelling way to communicate my ideas to customers is something that really appeals to me. The anti-PowerPoint theory runs like this: people are tired of seeing the same old clipart, the same eye charts with tiny, unreadable text, and the same bulleted lists over and over, so they don't even listen anymore. I've seen some really compelling presentations this year, including one from BMW chief designer Chris Bangle that was a 2-hour PowerPoint presentation that didn't have any words on any slides-- he brilliantly used images alone to make his point.
When I was in college, of course we didn't even have PowerPoint, and no classroom had a projector, unless you count transparency machines as projectors (ah, those were the days). I've been trying to think about how we got the information in classes-- I think it was just taking pages and pages of notes.
Nowadays everything is on PowerPoint-- all of my classes have associated PPT files, and every class thus far has consisted of professors basically paging through slide after slide-- two 4-hour sessions every other week, in our case.
Is this really the future of education? More and more I'm wondering what the next information delivery paradigm will be.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment