October 2008

A Word from the Director

PowerPoint as a Teaching Tool

We have had a considerable amount of discussion around PETAL the last few weeks about PowerPoint, particularly in terms of the advantages of converting slideshows to PDF files for easier downloading and printing by students, and while there are certainly circumstances where this isn’t feasible for some faculty (e.g., high definition graphics, important animations, etc.), it is generally the best option when students intend to print the slides.

However, converting slides to PDF requires either Adobe Acrobat (which requires money), Office2007 (which has a free plug-in that allows you to save Office files as PDFs), or one of the many third-party plug-ins available (which often don’t require money).  The best of the free plug-ins that I’ve seen is PrimoPDF.

Making the slides available as PDF offers several advantages. First, it generally creates a much smaller file, especially when your slides have a lot of graphics, which makes for much easier downloads. It also doesn't require your students to have PowerPoint on their computer (virtually everyone has the Acrobat Reader).

You can also improve the readability and printability of your slides by temporarily changing the theme design to a boring white background with black text for printing (you'd never "pimp up" a simple Word document for printing, would you?). You can also make it grayscale instead of color to save printer toner for the student (or the campus computer lab).

Whichever conversion method you chose, I suggest you "print" the slides to PDF, either six or three slides per page (depending on whether you want the note taking lines that the three-slide option provides), unless considerable graphic detail is required.

What remains to be discussed, however, is whether or not we should even be giving our slides to our students at all, or whether we should be providing them before or after we use them in class.

A primary factor in all of this is that students want the slides. They even demand them in many cases, but we must, as instructors, think about what is best for their learning processes. And that "best" might vary considerably between instructors, as well as between lessons/lectures.
In general, I tend to side against providing slides to students before class (or in the form of handouts during class) because it makes an already passive form of learning even more passive.

The simple act of writing their notes down involves the translation of your language into their own, encoding it into their minds and memories.  Plus, an important step in the learning process for students is the decision of what is important enough to write down.
But if they have your slides, the important stuff is already written down, relieving them of the necessary effort of taking notes, or of even listening.

An even bigger potential drawback in the phenomenon known as “PowerPointization.”  When students have your slides, they will tend to equate them with your lecture, even though the words in the slides are only a small sample, a travesty, of what you said in class.

And therefore everything is reduced to a set of bullets.  The complexity, the wonder, the nuance of knowledge and ideas that we value so deeply as academics and intellectuals, that we strive to instill in our students, is lost because intricate, complex, and dynamic relations of meaning are reified into overly simplistic bullets.

The problem is that very little in the real world that is worth teaching or learning at or above the college level is fixed or objective or reducible to bulleted lists or translatable to PowerPoint. Yet we do it every day in our classes because this little software tool practically forces us to do it.

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