PowerPoint Presentations - A Cure for Insomnia?

I didn't dare follow the link, for fear of falling asleep.
Powerpoint is no substitute for having presentation skills and being able to hold an audience.
I's barely one step removed from the old overhead projector where some charisma deficient idiot would turn his back on the audience and s-l-o-w-l-y read a slide which we'd all read 10 minutes ago....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
"Let me play the Lion too, I will roar that it will do any man's heart good to hear me".

(A GOOZ card to anyone who can place that quote!)

Del

A Midsummer Night's Dream : ACT I : Scene 2 by William Shakespeare ...

Good article - nearly linked it meself.

Great article and funny headline - as an insomniac myself, I had to click. When I got to the article, it definitely brought the LOLs just thinking about all the time, effort, and coffee I've had to use to stay away during some PP presentations.

I personally find people who can talk and present without PP to be more engaging and interesting. Throughout college, I always knew that I was going to have a harder time staying away in classes that mainly used PP to relay information - because, as Del mentioned earlier, most of the time the presenter is just reading off the slides anyway! Even in my graduate studies I find that professors continue to use PP by copying from the text and then reading that information aloud - it makes for a very long 3 hours.

What a great article! When given the option, many of my less adventurous students will opt for a PowerPoint presentation. I've made it a habit to spend part of a lesson just giving an example of a horrible PowerPoint I made in order to have students critique what I do wrong and emphasize that they can be very dull for an audience.

Thanks for posting this.

Excellent article. Sadly, I've seen this approach in action.

"Beware of anyone who says that they're 'just going to talk to some slides' - because that's exactly what they'll do - without realising that they're spending most of their time with their backs to the audience."

Any one else have some PowerPoint horror stories?

How about a 143 page PowerPoint presentation I had to endure last week. By the time it was over (2.5 hrs), so many peoples heads were hitting their chest, then jerking awake, that it looked like a convention of bobble-head dolls!

Readers of this thread will be highly likely to profit from (or simply enjoy) Edward Tufte's paper, "The Cognitive Deficiencies of PowerPoint." (It's a total hoot, and I have it, but I can't find it right now, so I hope I haven't misquoted the title.) Tufte is a brilliant communicator of how to assemble visually compelling and understandable graphics (and how to flub them). You will not regret searching out this paper.

DaveJ, London, UK says: Am I the only one to have counted all the words on slide 8 and found it to be a perfectly average slide?

What about: "The average PowerPoint session runs for 250 minutes startup to shutdown" that's over 4 hours: can't be right!

"The average PowerPoint session runs for 250 minutes startup to shutdown" - maybe it just seems like that!

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