PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
by Volker Weber
Clive Thompson in The New York Times:
In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program.
PowerPoint is the world's most popular tool for presenting information. There are 400 million copies in circulation, and almost no corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint is actually making us stupider?
This year, Edward Tufte -- the famous theorist of information presentation -- made precisely that argument in a blistering screed called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. In his slim 28-page pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension.
[via /.]
Comments
Ooops... no image? What about a post preview at least :)
Here is the link to the poster:
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
Urh... gratuitous MS bashing. Isn't the real issue that too few folks know how to communicate effectively ... regardless of the technology assist used. I suppose in our brave new world that if Freelance or Harvard Graphics (formerly the #1 packages at one time or another) or for that matter Persuasion, PageMaker or Quark ... the shuttle would never have disintegrated ;-)
Giving a power tool to a novice doesn't make the novice an expert. Don't even get me going about typography...
This has nothing to do with some obscure company located in Redmond, WA.
This is about "The Cognitive Style of Slideware".
And it just so happen that the main pourvoyeur of ''slideware'' is that small company in Redmond, WA.
That company is therefore guilty by association. CQFD. ;)
Indeed; but bashig M$ is so much... FUN! Especially after the bruising their products give me day after day at work. :-)
No issue with the MS bashing ... here's my recent peeve ... I was running PPT (v10) when I installed another software package. Now PPT won't run because it's determined that a user profile change has occured and that I need to provide the CD. Of course ... I don't have the CD handy and I'm gonna be three days late on a presentation as a result.
FYI to all ... I was the lead architect for Freelance/Windows for 2 major releases (oh so long ago it now seems). I really wish that IBM would dust off the bits and throw them into open source, make them available for free, something... There is virtually nothing I couldn't do with an 10+ year old Freelance that most people do with PPT today.
Some time ago I tried to use freelance and powerpoint by scripting in LotusScript. It was kind of a presentation builder.
The usage of powerpoint succeeded easily where the use of freelance was doomed due to stability and documentation issues.
So I would not beg IBM to make Freelance open source.
The world is a slide....
Personal bias here ... I'll betcha that < 5%, perhaps < 1% of folks who build presentations do scripting. If you are that sophisticated and want to script things in a presentation -- then I'd *strongly* recommend shifting over to Flash.
Can't open source Freelance -- or any other part of SmartSuite -- too much licensed code in there...we've considered it.
Die Power-Pointe (German Language)
Sueddeutsche Magazin Nr. 13 vom 26.03.2004
http://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/front_content.php?lang=2&idcatside=520
for many years I have avoided slideware, (ppt) not because of any aversion to microsofty, which is inevitable for a Mac user who started on CPM & remembers some nerd from Redmond giving me a copy of MS OS 1.0 to try on my Osborne portable (1979)... but now I have begun to use it to catch up with my students who are addicted to it. I am teaching in the UAE national university with 85% female students. They have terrible English langauge skills & have been educated to memorize & regurgitate streams of supposed facts. Now that they have laptops & graphics they happily express themselves very creatively. So what if most of the information they design into their presentations are downloaded images & text, which would be viewed as plagarism in most Euro-American universities. To me it is watching latent creativity and supressed expression unfold in form that is more imortant than content. But the real magic is not powerpoint, but photoshop and graphic programs they use to create the slides, as original designs. They run circles around me, but I am climbing the learning curve to create slides, the delivery program (ppt) is thus irrelevant.
