Tuesday, October 26, 2004
An acquaintance commented that my blog seems a bit "tame," (unrepresentative of my radical self?) so I thought it may be the time to throw in a little profanity. So here goes:
PowerPoint sucks big monkey balls
Disclaimer: About 20% of the time, PowerPoint does not
suck. In fact, when used properly, it's the great communication tool its creators intended it to be. HOWEVER, most of the time, PowerPoint is misused, and like any other abuse of technology, can cheapen the human experience (along with hedonism, gluttony, the "overnutrition" epidemic, trendy clothes made by Bangladeshi children paid 80 cents a day, boob jobs, spray-on tans, our reliance on our cars, shopping as a "hobby," lack of respect for language, reality TV, apathy, people who think God is partisan, and the abandonment of walking as a mode of transportation and social interaction).
"Do you want to minimize interaction with your students? Do you despise making eye contact when you speak to people? Do you like to turn the lights off so you never have to look at the smelly, unkempt formaldehyde-urchins who grace you with their stench every morning? Then use Microsoft PowerPoint--it's been voted 'Crutch of the Year' by The Complacent Pedagogues of America three years in a row!
Science teachers, if you're presenting a complicated sequence of biochemical events, you don't have to explain it step by step--just put it all in one image that you flash on the screen for 20 seconds! And remember, printing off PowerPoint notes keeps lumberjacks employed by using 3 reams of paper for every 20 words of text!"
You see, we modern-day vet students, probably like many other students of science, spend about seven hours a day looking at PowerPoint slides. Yes, for classes that involve plethoras of visual information, PowerPoint can be a useful tool. However, for lectures about concepts involving processes or math or biochemical cascades, PowerPoint falls short. Some of our professors know this, and hence use the good old-fashioned overhead projector, or the medieval chalkboard.
Ahh, the chalkboard. When I was in undergrad, virtually all my professors used a chalkboard, and only a few cutting-edge tecchies were into overhead projectors (but then again, back then, no one had ever heard of a prion, stem cell research was not a hot topic, and biological taxonomy only had five kingdoms). Either way, students watched as teachers wrote out chemical equations or drew arrows to the next step in the cascade. I know Dr. JoAnn Eurell will point out that with the growing popularity of tablet PCs, teachers can handwrite notes on the screen during a PowerPoint presentation. But that doesn’t solve the lighting issues.
Sitting in the dark is not conducive to staying awake, and to exacerbate sleepiness, many teachers speak with a hushed, soothing or monotone voice, now that 21st century technology has also brought microphones into the classrooms.
However, my biggest beef with PowerPoint is how lecture content seems to be getting more and outline-oriented. Granted, we may need outlines to manage information, but material should be presented to us as a complete (and Heaven forbid--interactive?) lecture, not as a
reading of a list.
Hell, I can go print out the slide presentations and read them in 10 minutes, rather than the 50 minutes the instructors take, but then I'd have to spend my money on paper, when I've already spent all I've got on tuition.
If I wanted to pay several grand a year to have people
rattle off lists to me, I would have hired a team of
Billy Crudup,
Matt Damon, and Dr.Grimm look-alikes to do it. Oh well--too late now!
