Powerpoint
This semester, I have been doing something I swore I’d never do–using powerpoint to teach my Contracts class. It was a necessity during the first half of the semester–I couldn’t walk to the board to scribble unintelligibly. And then, well, since I started, I thought I might as well finish.
Some things are fun–you can pull in pictures easily. Today, for example, I have a picture of Job –complete with boils–to illustrate the patience of one party to a contract before pulling the plug due to repeated breach by the other party.
And then I started thinking about religion and imagery and visual aides. Can we imagine preaching with power points slides? (I was thinking how you’d power point Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”) Now that would be entertaining.
But there’s still part of me that wonders if powerpoint is really that helpful a teaching device. It’s becoming ubiquitous at professional presentations. Does it have a place in religious communication Is it a way of integrating word and image? Is it a distraction? Any thoughts?
Cathy,
Interesting post; I have been using Powerpoint in class for some time now, and I am still asking myself the question of whether it is worth it.
There are distinct advantages to it for teaching biblical courses. I can project texts on the screen, texts that I have highlighted or structured to show the formal elements and key ideas. Taking a chart from the textbook and including it is also helpful for focusing student attention on what is essential to know by way of dates, facts, etc. Sometimes including an image of a manuscript or ancient artifact brings a bit of life to the subject.
On the other hand, the biggest disadvantage I see is that the students are less familiar with the actual texts in the Bible, where they are located, and how they are related to the larger book they are drawn from. When I started this method I noticed that students stopped bringing their Bibles to class. I suppose that I indirectly encouraged that by projecting the texts on the screen. Now I insist that they have the Bible open in front of them, as we are discussing what is on the screen. Still not everyone brings the Bible. Another disadvantage is that I find that using technology in the classroom encourages passivity among the students. I will never forget the student who brought her younger sister to class one day and asked me if it would be alright for her sister to watch class. My response was, “Certainly, as long as she does not try to change the channel.”
I think a lot depends on your audience – as well as the purpose of the presentation.
I find that a lot of ‘professionals’ here in Honduras like to use powerpoint in a “DataShow.” A danger is that many just put almost all their notes in a slide and there is a proliferation of words. A lot more thought needs to be put into ‘how’ one formats a presentation.
My best experience was a presentation I was preparing (on two days notice) for a members of one parish (all but one with 6 years or less of formal education) on Catholic Social Thought.I had the powerpoint all ready. But we couldn’t get the projector to work – and then the electricity went. And so I had to do it all WITHOUT powerpoint. It went VERY well – and there was a lot of participation which I think would not have happened if I’d use the powerpoint.
But I have also see it used well when trying to get a large group (100) to agree on policies. People were able to see proposals and then see revisions.
A danger of powerpoints – at least in some situations – is that they encourage not only passivity but taking the presenter’s view as THE truth – when a point is intended as a way to encourage people to think and discuss.
It is not well-suited to interactive teaching styles, in particular, not suited to lectures where you encourage discussions and are open to following them where they lead, even if in unexpected directions. That’s a deal-breaker for me.
Other minuses: For inexperiences users, it may lead the instructor to look at the screen rather than the class, breaking eye contact and making the class more anonymous. It also encourages bullet points rather than in-depth, fully developed arguments.
Since preaching is virtually never interactive, and since it already sometimes uses visual props such as stained glass windows or statues, I don’t see why it couldn’t use powerpoint as well.
A few scattered thoughts:
1. Prezi beats Powerpoint in ease of use and just coolness.
2. The Gettysburg Powerpoint is classic: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm
3. Edward Tufte has quite a few things to say about Powerpoint: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html
There’s a new series of small, illustrated philosophy books “Introducing . . .” You might even call them comic books if they didn’t have stiff paper covers. They include the notoriously difficult Heidegger and Wittgenstein. They include either short original texts or summaries of major points, plus cartoons illustrating them. I must admit I think they are quite well done.
We need images to think of concepts, even the most abstract ones. It is not surprising that pictures help because lmost all human pictures abstract from details at least to some degree. As Claire points out, stained glass windows have been used effectively, even for the illiterate. But the windows certainly have their limitations. The extreme alternative is the pilpul of the Jewish scholars, but that method also has obvious drawbacks. Also note the icons of the Orthodox, which though apparently simple are laden with abstract meaning. (Don’t forget: “abstract” does NOT mean “unreal”.) Islam notably rejects religious pictures, and i wonder whether or not this has affected the Muslim use of close analysis of texts by their intellectuals. (Or maybe I just don’t know enough about the history of Islamic theology and shouldn’t be making such a statement.)
If I could use it in preaching, I would, at least occasionally. For example, if I want to relate the Gospel of the day to a current event, I could project a headline from the local newspaper. I’d think that sort of visual aid would heighten the effectiveness of the communication.
Most mega-churches love using powerpoint in sermons.
It depends on what you want to teach, preach, or change in the audience. (vidience?)
Catholicism has strong tradition of using images to convey information, ideas, or even to evoke alternate realities, from sacraments to icons to art and architecture. Arguably, printed words are the worst way to present religious ideas, but since God used them to craft the Bible…
At the opposite end, Islam sees the words of the Koran as sacred. This makes the words and calligraphy into the subjects of some magnificent art and artforms. It conveys a different set of things from pure realistic images, or even abstract imagery, since it ensures a concrete meaning from the words alongside the images.
So why should a powerpoint presentation of the way of the cross be less effective than 14 images interspersed throughout a church? Its transience sends a different message than the stable images, it is “cooler” since the people are more receptive, etc. It simply takes some skill to use the medium effectively, being sure that the message is paired to the images.
Liturgy shouldn’t include powerpoint, for the same reason that live theater doesn’t normally include movies. Visuals try to capture the eye and focus it on one thing. The nature of the liturgical experience is fed by variety and indirection. Too much focus is a bad thing. We mistakenly try to make liturgy resemble an intellectual event, where people are called to think and to decide. It’s a woeful reductionism. Its also a mistake to think that liturgy is all (or mostly) about the eye and the ear. It is also about the belly and the foot. It’s something we do, not something we watch.
Powerpoint can work well in certain circumstances. But when the verbal element imposes judgments and conclusions and “action points” I think it can turn audiences off or make them actively resistent, if not resentful.
I think it is best when a lecturer chats interactively with an audience, referring to the visuals as needed. Once I was supposed to give a lecture based on a very detailed article I had written on the illustration history of a book. Fortunately, the time alotted was nowhere near what I would have needed to do what they wanted. So I showed a selection of illustrations and photos and chatted with the audience about them, going back and forth to answer questions, etc. It worked out well, and changed my views about the possibilities of Powerpoint. You have to take charge of it, not just point at it.
Does anyone remember filmstrips?
I have known students who want PPT that you’ll post on ANGEL or Blackboard as notes so that “when I’m absent I won’t miss anything.”
That tells me a lot of other teachers upload their entire spiel on PPT and simply read it to the class in such a way as to make them somewhat superfluous to the class they’re teaching.
I love your picture of Job, though, to introduce a topic. I often play YouTube clips to get us into the day’s topic (today we started our unit on public service annoucements, and I used the fake PSAs on the special features from “Talledega Nights”: “Let’s talk about kids learning to read too early ….”)
I already feel that even in a live lecture without notes the students see me as if I were a talking head on TV, unable to hear or see what they were doing in their seats. (I make them do a class presentation early on in the semester so they’ll realize that, yes, I can see them texting on their damn phones, even if they think they’re being cagey about sneaking the devices out of their bags and holding the phones under the desks to text.)
So I don’t use PPT for that reason. Plus it’s just one more thing to prepare, and, being a bit OC about the way things look when they go on handouts and overheads, another thing to obsess over.
I do put an agenda on Word which I project onto the screen at the front of the class–a godsend for people like me with horrible handwriting. As we go through the lecture, I type in important points, examples (or have students come up to type in examples). I save these notes at the end of the period and post. But students would pretty much have to have been there to decipher them.
On the other hand, “real world” clients often require your presentations in PPT so they can post them for internal review, and they expect a pretty detailed outline/summary of your main points that can function as a stand-alone.
OK, that went on too long.
Prof. Kavey – use them all the time. Yes, there is an on-going debate about their effectiveness with customers, marketing, etc. in our business – see link:
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8207849.stm
Published: 2009/08/19 07:31:01 GMT
Highlights:
“The problem with PowerPoint
If you have worked in an office in the Western world in the past 25 years, you will probably have sat through a PowerPoint presentation. But there’s a problem. They’re often boring, writes presentation expert Max Atkinson.
In the past 25 years, I’ve asked hundreds of people how many PowerPoint presentations they’ve seen that came across as really inspiring and enthusiastic.
Most struggle to come up with a single example, and the most optimistic answer I’ve heard was “two”.
So what are the main problems?
SCREENS ARE MAGNETS FOR EVERYONE’S EYES
Beware of anyone who says that they’re “just going to talk to some slides” – because that’s exactly what they’ll do – without realizing that they’re spending most of their time with their backs to the audience.
Yet eye contact plays such a fundamental part in holding an audience’s attention that even as brilliant a speaker as Barack Obama depends on an autocue to simulate it.
So remember that the more slides you have and the more there is on each slide, the more distracting it will it be for the audience – whereas the fewer and simpler the slides are, the easier it will be to keep them listening.
READING AND LISTENING DISTRACTS AUDIENCES
If there’s nothing but text on the screen, people will try to read and listen at the same time – and won’t succeed in doing either very well.
If the print is too small to read, they’ll get irritated at being expected to do the impossible. Nor does it help when speakers say “as you can see”, or the equally annoying “you probably won’t be able to read this”.
SLIDES SHOULDN’T JUST BE NOTES
Few speakers are willing to open their mouths until they have their first slide safely in place. But all too often the slides are verbal crutches for the speaker, not visual aids for the audience.
Projecting one slide after another might make it look as though you’ve prepared the presentation. But if you haven’t planned exactly what you’re going to say, you’ll have to ad lib and, if you start rambling, the audience will switch off.
To avoid this requires careful planning. Do this before thinking about slides and you won’t need as many of them – and the ones that you do decide to use are more likely to help to clarify things for the audience, rather than just remind you of what to say next.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
You think bullet points make information more digestible? Think again. A dozen slides with five bullet points on each assumes that people are mentally capable of taking in a list of 60 points. If it’s a 30-minute presentation, that’s a rate of two-per-minute.
This highlights the biggest problem with slide-based presentations, which is that speakers mistakenly think that they can get far more information across than is actually possible in a presentation. At the heart of this is a widespread failure to appreciate that speaking and listening are fundamentally different from writing and reading.
In fact, the invention of writing was arguably the most important landmark in the history of information technology. Before writing, the amount of information that could be passed on to others was severely limited by what could be communicated in purely oral form (i.e. not much). But the ability to write meant that vast amounts of knowledge could be communicated at previously unimagined levels of detail.
The trouble is that PowerPoint makes it so easy to put detailed written and numerical information on slides that it leads presenters into the mistaken belief that all the detail will be successfully transmitted through the air into the brains of the audience.
THE BULLET POINT PROBLEM
A Microsoft executive recently said that one of the best PowerPoint presentations he’d ever heard had no slides with bullet points on them. This didn’t surprise me at all, because we’ve known for years that audiences don’t much like wordy slides and don’t find them as helpful as pictorial visual aids.
What does surprise me is that so many of the program’s standard templates invite users to produce lists of bullet points, when the program’s main benefits lie in the creation of images. If more presenters took advantage of that, inspiring PowerPoint presentations might become the norm, rather than the exception.
Max Atkinson is the author of Speech-making & Presentation Made Easy.
But, my experience is that if they are short; pithy, include stories, successes, highlight ROI, etc. customers love them and they are much better than reams of data. Yes, the last point about using slides with no words can be a smashing success but you gots to know what you are doing.
Teaching – if you teach in a high school/elementary school, college that is wired and has smart boards and the school has its own system in which your class materials can be stored and accessed – well, this is a great teaching tool. I basically only use it as I would notes – it is background – I do not look at them and teach in front of the screen – rarely alluding to the PPT.
Church – the Paulist Center in downtown Boston has used projection techniques for years and I found it to be excellent – used to show resources, information, key speakers, songs. I did not find it to be distracting at all and agree with Jim et alii that, used well, it can be a valuable tool in preaching, announcements, songs. Not sure I like what mega-churches do with them but then I do not like the mega-church experience.
Hello Cathy (and All),
I’ve experimented quite a bit with Power Point. I’m somewhat an outlier in philosophy because I have settled into using Power Point for presenting papers to faculty and never using it in class. I tried using Power Point in my classes a few times and while some philosophy instructors can use it effectively, I am too interactive and too spontaneous to do so – in my case Power Point distracted everybody when I tried using it to teach. I have settled into an extreme “low tech” approach to my teaching and one of my rules is that no one, including me, may use any electronic devices, including computers, during class.
On the other hand I always use Power Point when I present a paper and that’s still uncommon in philosophy, where most professors just read their paper in public. I think it’s so hard to try to follow the thread of argument in a philosopher’s paper that Power Point is invaluable to help people from getting completely lost. This has on occasion caused some trouble because many philosophy departments cannot afford a projector that will project the Power Point on the screen, but this problem is fading as more universities equip al their classrooms with AV equipment.
Anyone who has dealt with PowerPoint in business has sat in meetings that began 10-15 minutes late because the technology wasn’t functioning at the designated start time. To my mind, that would be the greatest obstacle to using it for a homily.
The two videos on this page say it all about Powerpoint:
http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/05/don_mcmillan_bad_powerpoint_humor.html
The real problem is that most people have no clue how to use presentation software effectively — just like so many priests have no clue how to preach effectively.
Anyone who has dealt with PowerPoint in business has sat in meetings that began 10-15 minutes late because the technology wasn’t functioning at the designated start time.
This is so true!
Burke – priceless; thanks.
Rita – could name a thousand reasons for why you are right about the liturgy and the use of technology. Yet, something nags at me:
- how many of us sit through sermons (notice, I do not say homily) given by a person with a foreign accent that is so bad, you pick up every tenth word;
- wonder if this would not force/support some poor homilists into better organization/preparation
- not imagining using many slides – a few with pictures more than words to make a point; show the historical traditions of the church e.g. photo of a location, church, person, event
- i have seen excellent use of a verse from a musical choice that Sunday inserted to highlight the composer’s use of that day’s scripture, his/her blood and sweat to compose, etc.
- dare say that we have a minority of priests who know how to give good homilies – see few efforts to improve, change, or increase this skill
- wonder if there are not appropriate groups/ages that could benefit from this technique – not every week-end but off and on
- announcements? realize liturgy is not adult education but at the end of liturgy as we are sent forth – any way random thoughts.
“The nature of the liturgical experience is fed by variety and indirection. Too much focus is a bad thing. We mistakenly try to make liturgy resemble an intellectual event, where people are called to think and to decide. It’s a woeful reductionism. ”
Hi, Rita, don’t you think, though, that the intellect is involved in preaching and hearing the homily in particular?
FWIW – your comment made me reflect on some of the ways we do use technology. I did baptisms yesterday. Because it’s just me and the families, I typically lead the group in a hymn at the beginning of the celebration. I turn my microphone off for the hymn (in part because my singing voice is no great shakes :-)). But most of our worship, at baptisms, mass, funerals and so on, is electronically amplified. If we didn’t do that, people would complain that they can’t hear.
On Easter, our worship space can’t hold all of the worshippers who come to mass. So we have several “overflow” areas where, in essence, folks sit on chairs and watch it all on television. It’s awful, and I feel terrible for the folks who didn’t/couldn’t arrive 45 minutes before mass in order to get a seat in the worship space. But what else can we do?
If you’re going to use your laptop to make a presentation at church — or at other time — you should be really careful to open the right folder. A recent cautionary tale:
“Anyone who has dealt with PowerPoint in business has sat in meetings that began 10-15 minutes late because the technology wasn’t functioning at the designated start time.”
That used to be true, but not any more. I remarked on that recently after a conference where the 100 or so powerpoint talks all went without a single hitch: there used to be a slight trepidation when the talk was supposed to start, because we could never be sure that everything would work right. Not any more! At least among computer scientists, this is a solved problem.
I have suffered through masses in which the words to the hymns were posted on a gargantuan jumbotron, so everyone who was singing was staring up at something a la The Matrix. To have to suffer through cutsie-wootsies during homilies would be a bit too much.
Of course, I’m an old codger and this new fangled-stuff ain’t my cuppa tea. I don’t tweet, twit, book my face, text messes, etc.
I am for Power for the Students point. A machine or person should admonish the teacher/lecturer not to stay in the same place, inflection or point too long. Reading any point for longer than two minutes should be prohibited. Flags should be raised if the professor keeps the same expression for the entire class. Etc. Finally, the professor should look like s/he has worked after the class is over which will assure that the student’s get their money’s worth.
Bill – your rules would eliminate at least 50% of all university tenured professors.
My daughter in 4th grade is really impressed that the 5th grade class uses a “smart board” for more interactive learning. Her secret theory, though, is that she thinks the teacher uses it because he is a new teacher and doesn’t know how to teach yet.
Creative liturgy in judaism:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/us/03prayerbook.html?_r=1
They say one of their reasons for editing a new version of their prayer books is to try to get the “lapsed” Jews back into the synagogue!