I’ve never liked PowerPoint.  To be honest, I’ve never even used it.  I’ve never been in a situation that needed a slideshow presentation, which I’m thankful for because I despise them.  I find them boring, lazy, unimpressive, and unimaginative.  Of course, there are always exceptions to this, as some slides I’ve seen from my professors have been well done, but the vast majority aren’t.  Edward Tufte expresses these concerns in his article on the evils of PowerPoint, saying that the presence of PowerPoint and slideshows in schools is for the worst.

I of course agree with him; slideshows and PowerPoint shouldn’t belong anywhere, especially in educational environments.  For teachers and students alike, these presentations are a half-assed cop-out for actual lectures and assignments.  The line between bad PowerPoint and worse PowerPoint is thin, with having too much and too little information per slide very hard to overcome.  During some of my classes, the professor will literally recite the slides verbatim, making me wonder why I’m even attending class and not just reading the slide files off BlackBoard.  Other times, the slides will be so filled with words and dots and images that I don’t know what to focus on, which makes taking notes difficult.  And then there’s the student presentations that rely wholly on slides.  I’m proud to say that I’ve never used PowerPoint for any of my class assignments, not wishing to put my fellow students through what they’ve put me through; sitting bored out of my mine as someone stands at the front of the class reading off his computer screen a long-winded slide that I can already see off a projector and have read through numerous times before they finish and repeat for another 20 slides.

There are cases that PowerPoint can be used to good affect.  I don’t think I could have gotten through my Psych 300 class (Statistics In Psychology) without the professor’s equation slides, that were simple and much faster than her writing three line stat equations on the board.  Also, graphs and charts are a lot easier to put onto a slide than hand drawing them, so in an astronomy or geology class I can see how a PowerPoint presentation could be useful and effective.  Still, I dislike PowerPoint with a passion, and feel that many people have fallen into a habit of using it out of ease and simplicity, where other more traditional methods of presenting and teaching would be must more welcomed and effective.