PowerPoint is evil? I don't think so

Here’s an interesting article from WIRED magazine called “PowerPoint is Evil” by a professor in Yale. I was shocked to see such hostility toward PowerPoint. He made some interesting claims, but his argument, at least to me, seemed extremely biased. His examples of PowerPoint charts were poor. Nobody would make such inefficient charts if he/she has been using PowerPoint for some time. (Notice that this article was written in 2003, so the PowerPoint he talks about might be different from PowerPoint we know today.)

He says PowerPoint is convenient for speakers but not for audiences. Do you agree with this? For me, as a student/audience, PowerPoint has been extremely helpful in understanding lectures. There are times when people would put too many words or too many distractions on slides, but most PowerPoint presentations and lectures have been easier to comprehend and increased my attention span compared to just professors or presenters talking talking and talking.

Like we have discussed in class, visuals can sometimes tell much more than words. Also, ‘bullet points’ style of most PowerPoint slides has enabled me to follow the lecture in a organized manner. When I was an undergraduate student, one of the best note-taking I’ve done was to print out PowerPoint slides from blackboard (some professors post their PowerPoint slides before the lecture), and take it to the class to take notes on it. This has been extremely helpful since I can listen to the professor and concentrate on lecture more, not just scribbling for the entire hour, which is very very distracting.

I personally find nothing wrong with PowerPoint. I think it has made our students’ and professors’ life easier. The only negative thing about this, perhaps, is the monopoly nature of PowerPoint. I hope there was some other presentation software to compete with PowerPoint just like Firefox has challenged the Internet Explorer or Picasa has stood up to Photoshop.