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Let's ban PowerPoint in lectures it makes students more stupid and professors more boring
Any university teacher who does not harbour a painful recollection of a failed lecture is a liar.
On one such occasion, I felt early on that I had lost the students entirely: those who hadnt
sunk into comatose oblivion were listless and anxious. Ungracefully, I threw myself even
deeper into my PowerPoint presentation to save me from total ruin. Years later, I can still
hear myself reading aloud the bullet points from the overhead and see myself turning around
to the students to sell these points to them.
Luckily, I have no recollection of what the students thought of it, but my most painful memory
is the experience of boring myself. When that happens, it is time to change ones ways.
Thats why Ive led a move to ban PowerPoint from lectures.
There are a host of possible reasons for a lecture going wrong: a badly planned course,
inadequate preparation, feeling uninspired on the day, disengaged students, a crowd thats
too big, a poorly designed auditorium. To this bulleted list of catastrophes comes
PowerPoint.
https://theconversation.com/lets-ban-powerpoint-in-lectures-it-makes-students-more-stupid-and-professors-more-boring-36183
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7/27/2015
Let's ban PowerPoint in lectures it makes students more stupid and professors more boring
The physical face-to-face lecture is potentially a complex and open event where the
students, the readings, the lecturer and a case-based or theoretical problem interact. A
PowerPoint presentation locks the lecture into a course that disregards any input other than
the lecturers own idea of the lecture conceived the day before. It cuts off the possibility of
improvisation and deviation, and the chance to adapt to student input without veering off
course.
This is usually what makes such presentations so painfully boring: while it quickly becomes
evident to the audience where the presenter is going, he or she has to walk through all the
points, while the audience dreams that the next slide might be more interesting.
On top of this comes the ambivalence of whats in those bullet points. In my presentations,
the text on slides are really just my private and often hastily written down thoughts. Unlike
my other published and peer-reviewed work, no one has seen or criticised my PowerPoints.
Yet the students perceive my bullet points as authoritative, and they would often quote them
in their assignments instead of going through the toll of finding the meaningful points in the
https://theconversation.com/lets-ban-powerpoint-in-lectures-it-makes-students-more-stupid-and-professors-more-boring-36183
2/3
7/27/2015
Let's ban PowerPoint in lectures it makes students more stupid and professors more boring
https://theconversation.com/lets-ban-powerpoint-in-lectures-it-makes-students-more-stupid-and-professors-more-boring-36183
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