Is Powerpoint the Devil?

For the longest time I have thought Powerpoint was some kind of evil incarnate. Like many other MS Apps, I believe that the program has actually changed the way things are done rather than people finding a tool that does what they need. Do you think when they started out that the people at Microsoft had the idea that they were going to permeate graphic design and information delivery to the depth that they have? The thought that what was a business tool has become such a normal education tool is a little scary. Working at the board is dynamic - lecturing is jazz, not a march. Even if the tool has the ability to go backward and forward and to write on the screen over a slide, it can't skip from one presentation to another smoothly, and I would bet that some of the other mitigations aren't implemented by most of the people using the tool.

So its the Devil, right?

Like so many things, I guess it depends on your perspective. Today we used a Powerpoint presentation at a faculty meeting. I had spent some time the night before cutting and pasting about 7 emails into a presentation file. The result was that 6 different people giving an update to a single effort were able to present something cohesive. All six people didn't have to put time into the composition, and I myself didn't have to generate everything from scratch, and on top of it all, people walked away from the meeting with a copy of the slides. Since the purpose of the session was to recap things we'd talked about several times before, times when people could have taken their own notes, getting the slides as a take home seems like a fairly high value facet. Seems like in this case we had hit the target of what the software is good for and it delivered startlingly.

So not completely the Devil?

Since I did this presentation while accumulating supplementary items for my renewal binder, no sooner did I hit save then did I print and punch a copy for my "school service" section. At that moment I was struck my another possible strength of the process. Right now all of my classroom lectures are outlines. Most of them are outlines with six years of scribbles on them, things that were missing, show or person specific items, connections to current events, whatever. They are a very valuable tool for me to teach with. In at least one case, they are also good enough for someone else to teach with - even if they don't know the subject. (Although I haven't tried that for years, but some time ago I would just put a student up front with the outline. Worked pretty well for CAD.) The downside, in this atmosphere of renewal, is that they are not presentable. If I had all of the lectures in PowerPoint, then in my binder along with the syllabus and all the assignments I could include the content outlines from every single course. That would really punch up the document especially since for my field, often people don't understand what I do. Too late now, but what an advantage at renewal time.

So, not the Devil?

Probably in the end I will always think PowerPoint is the Devil, even if it does have proper uses and archiving advantages. I know I can't submit my outlines, notes, and photos (I sometimes shoot a picture of the board at the end of class as source material for another lecture if I have had a particularly useful tangent). But for me, in class the improv element is too important to lose, and in meetings the whole thing still feels a little bit smarmy. Maybe for class I could make it more useful by doing the presentation against a whiteboard, so it could cut down the actual amount of writing for the stuff I know I am going to do but not cut off the room to roam. It might be worth experimenting with.

Today I could have been convinced. I wonder if the feeling will stick.