The PowerPoint Conflict

Research Points the Finger at PowerPoint:

Some Australian researches have found out that when your brain receives verbal and visual information at the same time, it’s harder to process. However this is exactly what happens in a PowerPoint presentation. Also they have found out that it is better for students to look at already solved problems instead of them trying to solve them.

In Defense of PowerPoint:

The writer states that PowerPoint presentations are simply boring when we watch slide after slide being shown and read to us, but that’s because of the presenter. The audience doesn’t really benefit from the slides at all, but mainly the speaker who reads off of them. When presenting something, one does not want to fill the audience with too much information they cannot possibly remember. Edward Tufte has had complaints about PowerPoint especially with the NASA Columbia incident. He says that on slide of a presentation did not fully explain the damage on the ship. The defender thinks the slide should have had less, but more important information on it. Also the experts of NASA had written what they had found out about the damage and that it wasn’t so serious, so it was their analyses that was false rather than the PowerPoint. They had also written an important fact in a small sized font, but they had already concluded it not to be significant. The experts knew exactly what they were doing and thought of it to be right, but they had written too much on the one important slide. He recommends that Tufte should use graphs for a large amount of data. His view of a good presentation is to deliver background information and display one’s points in different documents. One of those being personal notes which gives the crowd more information. Another one is slides that help show people more about the topic, such as graphs or pictures. The last on are the handouts which give clear information and references and more. PowerPoints are clearly not bad when they are used as they are supposed to.