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PowerPoint, evil or just a tool?

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This month’s Learning Circuit’s Big Question is: “PowerPoint – What is Appropriate, When and Why?“. Tony Karrer’s collected some nice articles about the underlying cognitive issues, and it jives with what I’ve seen. The big complaints are too much text on the screen, too many bullet points, and overloaded graphics. That’s not a surprise. This also clearly indicates to me it’s about bad use of PowerPoint, not the tool itself.

I took a two-day ‘presentation course’, after several years of university teaching and several corporate presentations, and recall the instructions that it’s about you, not the slides, and you shouldn’t have slides except when you’re showing a diagram. That’s similarly indicated by others. However, I think you need to look at the broader context of what sort of talk it is, who the audience is, and what the setting is. I mostly talk to practitioners at different levels. In my mind, a keynote is very different from a conference session from a board presentation from a customer presentation from a… PowerPoint will have different roles.

From this point on, I’m going to talk about useful information communication: stuff that helps you make decisions. This is not a keynote, nor even a customer presentation, but more like a conference or board presentation or a training session.
Speaking of which, conference organizers ask for your slides beforehand, and ask for handouts. As an attendee, I like having handouts to make notes on. And sometimes I even try to take a copy of slides for a presentation I can’t attend, when there’s another presentation at the same time I also want to attend and I haven’t yet mastered being in two places at once (though sometimes my clients insist that I must).

As a reality check, I went back and looked at my own PowerPoint presentations (conference presentations), and I’m not squeaky clean. I do have lots of graphics (I peg the ‘visual’ and ‘conceptual’ meters; see my Models page), but I also have bullet points. But that’s deliberate.

There’re several reasons. As indicated above, I like to have a place to take notes, and want to provide the same for my audience. Yes, they could have a pad of paper, but I like providing the slides with generous white space for them to take notes. I generally don’t put a lot of prose on those slides, but only telegraphic bits that keep me from forgetting an important point and that I elaborate on, not reciting against. Instead, a reminder both for me and the audience when they come back to the slides (I know that at least *some* do).

Also, I know that one way to keep people from being able to fully interpret what you’ve presented unless they attend is to not have all the prose on the slide. So the ‘key phrases’ approach is also a way to induce people to actually stick around and find out what they unpack to (without that extra presentation, it’s pretty hard to know what’s coming there, and again that’s deliberate). It also induces extra cognitive processing, to map what I say to the phrase, which is good for the right audience.

I also understand the realities of most presentation situations: that people’s attention can be distracted by someone coming in the room, by an email or text message, by a colleague’s wry comment, whatever. Having the structure of the handout and the slides helps them reconnect. Also, I do add extra references and tools to the end of the handout when appropriate to support taking action on the presentation. And, as part of the emotional as well as cognitive component, I like context-setting through images that elaborate prose, and quotes that pithily indicate some of the background thinking.

So, my answer to the question is that what’s appropriate are diagrams, quotes, images, and limited bullet point lists, in that order, for cognitive and emotional value. My presentations may not be perfect, but I strive to provide long-lasting value (not immediate appeal), just as in everything else I do.

See you in the funny papers

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I decided to elaborate a bit more on my comment that I think comics/cartoons are underused in learning, as I truly believe this. I’ve used them in elearning to serve as a motivating example, humorously exaggerating the negative consequences of not learning the material. I’ve also used them as story examples, where the character models the behavior of transforming an ill-formed statement into a well-formed statement. Why?

There are some powerful reasons to consider using cartoons and comic strips (graphic novels, manga, what have you). First, we understand the world in terms of stories, in many instances, and comic strips are a great way to communicate stories. They’re concise, and can minimize the amount of literacy required. And they’re visually appealing.

Then they elegantly simplify the context. You can include the necessary components, and allow the learner’s brain to fill in the rest. That’s true too for the transition between panels (see Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics for more). This may also facilitate the learner taking ‘ownership’ of the story, as they have to do some of the processing.

They also have one facility I really like. As Alan Shoenfeld’s work says, as I know it through Collins & Brown’s Cognitive Apprenticeship, experts need to make the underlying thought processes visible, not just the resulting steps (say, in working a problem). Thought bubbles are a great way to do this! You can do this with the ‘voiceover’ in audio and video (typically echoing slightly when it’s thoughts), but it’s easier to produce.

Comic ComicPragmatically, they can be relatively low-cost to produce, and they’re certainly low bandwidth (well, if you do it right ;). Brent Schenkler’s been talking about using ComicLife (a Mac app that lets you put speech and thought bubbles on photos) which would work as well, and then he points to tools that let you make comics! Here’s an elementary one I created with ComicLife. Not definitive, but illustrative (and doable with my limited skills).

Finally, they travel well. While humor might not (though certain types of humor should), the story will, as most if not all cultures have a form of comic strip and they’re easily comprehended. Practically, the internationalization and localization should be easy as well, as long as you leave enough room in the thought bubbles for languages like German translation (and keep all lettering in a separate layer).

I know, you have enough trouble talking about games in corporate settings, and comics may not be any easier, but think of the excitement of your audience, particularly young ones, talk about the lower cost to hit the global market and for lower-literacy employees. I even think they could be used to tell the corporate story (as has been done with novelizations).

Upcoming talk: Deeper eLearning

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At several conferences over the past couple of years, I’ve heard people talking about a need for a deeper understanding of instructional design. I’d sort of thought people understood ID, but I’ve seen too much ‘cookie cutter’ eLearning (and even F2F stuff) and have realized that there are a lot of people following templates without a real understanding of what the elements are and best principles around the elements.

I wrote a white paper (warning, PDF) about it, an abbreviated version of which appeared as an eLearnMag webzine article. However, it appeared there was demand for more.

So I created a talk and presented it at the local chapter, where it was well-received (“very good”, “great”, “learned a lot“, etc). In fact one of the audience members convinced me to offer it a a guest lecture in his class. Hey, there has to be some reason I’ve studied learning from every perspective imaginable!

Consequently, it’s one of the talks I’ll be giving at the eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering next week in Boston (besides the learning simulation design workshop). If you’re designing elearning, or learning at all, I hope I’ll see you there!