PowerPoint, we've got beef.
Dear PowerPoint,
Yesterday one of the professors I work with (a regular, you might say) was lamenting the shoddy slide decks she had recently received. Weird color choices, too much text on one slide, not enough text on another slide, low-resolution images—it was a mess, and she'd been driving herself crazy trying to fix literally hundreds of slides of content. Exasperated, she fired up her work, showing me the changes she had made. Without question, her version of the slide decks were an improvement. I could, at the very least, clearly read all the text on each slide. But I noticed a familiar pattern to her slides when she showed me her revisions, a certain cadence of content that I can only describe as "the PowerPoint style." And she isn't the first person I've witnessed fall into this trap.
You have this effect on people, PowerPoint, and I know that you mean well, but it's true. I don't know if it's because of how many features you have tucked away in various menus and ribbons, or whether we just never really took the time to understand you. But I need you to see what you've got people putting out into the world. Your style is easy to recognize:
incomplete sentences and fragments
choppy wording
paragraphs masquerading as bulleted lists
follow up points in those paragraphs also being bulleted
Of course, there are people who don't adopt this disjointed mode. You and I both know that one professor who will fill one of your slides with as much text as he can and then read it verbatim to his class for an hour. This isn't about him, though (we'll get to him soon enough). This is all about you, Powerpoint. So, why do people get this way around you?
I think a big problem we encounter when we start working with you is that we aren't sure how to use you. Teachers have a couple different needs that you can fulfill. The most obvious one, and what I think your true calling in life is, is that you provide a visual supplement to whatever a teacher presents. You are so good at putting pictures and text together on a slide and displaying it at the right time. And students love you, too. Relevant images and diagrams can simplify complex ideas. Concise text can reinforce the points a teacher makes. This is your wheelhouse, PowerPoint.
But teachers often end up using you for a second purpose, too. They’ll ask you to record their lectures or hold their lecture notes. Different rooms will have combinations of computers and projectors that limit what teachers have access to while they are standing at the front of their class. Rather than go into class blind, they give you the responsibility of remembering all the things they know they want to talk about that day. They may have two or three hours each week to fill, and it would be crazy for a person to keep all of that in their head along with all of their other responsibilities and obligations.
Here’s the problem. Students can see you organizing their lecture notes. You’re quite conspicuous there behind the teacher. And, frankly, it’s incredibly distracting. As soon as you pull up the next slide, their eyes widen, their fingers patter away in a drumming circle of desperate note-taking, and their ears shut off to avoid distraction. Now, we could get very technical and discuss how the cognitive load your busy slides generate hinders information processing, but the fact of the matter is this: Powerpoint, you’re stealing the show from the teachers you’re trying to help.
The boom in online learning has only made the problem worse. We have instructors who are faced with the difficulty (and for some, impossibility) of teaching online. Now, you know and I know that there are lots of options out there for recording lectures in advance or hosting live web meetings. But for various reasons (time, support, familiarity with the technology, time, resources, time), I know a number of instructors who lean on you more and more to be their voice in the online classroom. Instead of recording themselves, they put more faith in you, filling you up with even more disjointed bullet points, graphics, and videos. Truthfully, they want you to be a kind of e-textbook that they don’t have to rely on a publisher to build and update. However, they still write their points on your slides the same as if they were intending to lecture with them. Students are being given presentation slides without the presentation, and are left to their own devices to connect the conceptual dots between the dots in your bulleted lists.
And Powerpoint, baby, an e-textbook you are not. You are a presentation builder. It’s what you’re good at.
Have you ever been in a group of people that has that one star performer you could ask to do just about anything? The star seems to have a relevant life experience or skill for every need your group encounters. Slowly, your group comes to this person with increasingly exotic requests. And, of course, the star doesn’t say “No.” The star delivers. Here and there you notice their results lose some of the polish that made you love them, but hey—they’ve been so good. And they’re familiar. Wouldn’t you rather work with someone that’s reliable and has delivered in the past? You ask more of them, and your star performer still delivers, but now you’re making compromises on the quality of the work or the scope of what you’re doing. Without realizing it, you and your star performer are in a downward spiral whether neither of you can say “No.” Powerpoint, you’re a star, but your star animations have me in a mood.
Powerpoint, I believe—no, I know—that you can be a force for good in the classroom. But you can only be a force for good when you are helping us make good choices. And that part of your personality I don’t know how to fix. You really want to give us everything, but, maybe, everything isn’t what we need. We need a way to bring clarity to what we are saying, not 50 options for transition effects between slides (Yes, 50. Yes, I stopped counting halfway through to start over because I assumed I had messed up.) Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go write alt-text for 10 slide decks from a publisher.
Sincerely,
Nick