{"id":787,"date":"2006-11-04T11:57:59","date_gmt":"2006-11-04T11:57:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/04\/a-good-craftsman-never-blames\/"},"modified":"2006-11-04T11:57:59","modified_gmt":"2006-11-04T11:57:59","slug":"a-good-craftsman-never-blames","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/04\/a-good-craftsman-never-blames\/","title":{"rendered":"A Good Craftsman Never Blames His Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Effect Measure, Revere (or one of the Reveres, anyway, I’m not certain if they’re plural or not) has posted another broadside against PowerPoint<\/a>, calling it “the scourge of modern lecturing.” This is something of a sensitive point for me, as I use PowerPoint for my lectures in the introductory classes. I’ve been using it this way for more than five years, and I like to think I’ve gotten to be pretty good at it. I fully expect this to be brought up in my tenure review, though, and to have to justify my use of PowerPoint in class.<\/p>\n

Here’s the thing: PowerPoint is a tool<\/strong>, nothing more. It doesn’t make bad speakers into good speakers, or good speakers into bad speakers. The people you see giving boring and incoherent PowerPoint presentations? They’d be giving boring and incoherent presentations with regular slides or overhead transparencies. The people you see giving clear and inspiring presentations with PowerPoint? They’d give clear and inspiring presentations if they had to chisel their figures into stone tablets while they talked.<\/p>\n

PowerPoint doesn’t make presentations bad. It enables bad speakers to do a certain type of bad presentation very easily, but getting rid of PowerPoint won’t change these people into good speakers. It just changes the mode of their badness slightly.<\/p>\n

(Continued below.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“Yes, PowerPoint is a tool,” you say, “But I don’t remember talks this bad at meetings in the past.” That’s because they’re in the past<\/strong>. There has never been a time when all lectures were good lectures, just as there has never been a time when all pop music was good pop music. The lectures of the past seem better for the same reason that the pop music of twenty years ago seems better: because you’ve forgotten most of the crap.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, I’m not old enough to remember a time when chalkboards were the standard presentation method at professional meetings– by the time I started attending colloquia and then conferences in the early 1990’s, everybody in physics was using overhead projectors. And with a bit of effort, I can recall innumerable bad talks using overhead transparencies, many of which were bad in very similar ways to the bad PowerPoint talks I see now.<\/p>\n

In fact, most of the flaws of PowerPoint have direct analogues in the overhead transparency world. Too many slides? I once saw a student bring a full box of 50 slides for a 10-minute talk. Content-free bullet points? Lots of people did that with overheads. Distracting visual effects? Everybody’s seen at least one talk where the presenter spent a couple of minutes trying to stack up three or four transparencies that were supposed to line up to show some clever effect. Or the bit where you cover two-thirds of the slide with a sheet of paper, and scoot it down to reveal one line at a time.<\/p>\n

Yeah, it’s true, there are failure modes with PowerPoint that you don’t get with chalk on a blackboard. Nobody ever wrecked a chalk-talk with distracting animation effects. But there are failure modes with chalk that you don’t see in PowerPoint– I took E&M from a professor who could make every letter in the Greek alphabet look like a “Q”. If you didn’t watch carefully enough to catch the name of each symbol as he wrote it, you would find yourself staring at a blackboard covered with formulae that looked like “Q times q to the Q divided by Q times the square root of q.” I have yet to see that done with PowerPoint.<\/p>\n

I’ve seen the physics community make the transition from overhead transparencies to PowerPoint, and you know what? The people who gave good talks back when hand-written overhead slides were the norm, they still give good talks using PowerPoint. And the people who give terrible PowerPoint talks these days gave terrible talks using overhead transparencies back in the day.<\/p>\n

I’ve seen a lot of good talks, and I’ve given a few, and good talks are all the same. The speaker knows the material backwards and forwards, the talk is well organized with a clear and logical flow, the important points are presented in a cleanly and efficiently, and the level is appropriate for the audience.<\/p>\n

I’ve seen a lot of bad talks, and I’ve given a few, and bad talks are all the same. The speaker is unsure of the material or some aspects of it, the talk shows signs of being hastily put together (possibly from pieces of multiple different talks), the important points are buried in a sea of extraneous information and jargon, and the talk assumes knowledge that the audience doesn’t have.<\/p>\n

The mechanism used for the visual aids doesn’t matter. A good talk is a good talk, and a bad talk is a bad talk, whether the words are displayed on PowerPoint slides, written on a chalkboard, or written in blood on the tanned hides of infidel goats.<\/p>\n

Why do people complain about PowerPoint specifically? People complain about it because generations of students have been raised to believe that the default mode of presentation is chalk on a chalkboard, and any departure from that becomes something to latch onto as the cause of whatever you don’t like. When I give bad lectures using PowerPoint, students complain about PowerPoint. If I gave the same bad lecture using nothing but chalk on a chalkboard, they wouldn’t blame the chalk, they’d (correctly) blame the flaws in the lecture itself.<\/p>\n

Why do we see so many bad PowerPoint talks? We see bad talks because we don’t teach our students to give good<\/strong> talks. Not only do we not provide direct instruction in public speaking, we don’t provide any real incentive to do the work necessary to give good talks– or, for that matter, any dis<\/strong>incentive to giving bad talks. Yeah, people who are exceptionally good speakers tend to get more speaking invitations, but sit in on a semester or two of a departmental colloquium series, and you’ll see just as many bad talks as good ones– probably more. Go to a scientific meeting, and you’ll see way more bad talks than good ones. And it doesn’t make a difference to most of the people presenting– on a CV, a bad talk looks just the same as a good one.<\/p>\n

(There are some benefits to good speaking– if you get to the job interview stage, a good talk can make all the difference. I know for a fact that I have my current job in large part because I gave a very good talk when I interviewed here. But those occasions are relatively rare, compared to the times where all you really need to do is to show up and mumble, then add a line to your CV.)<\/p>\n

If you want to improve the quality of presentations at scientific meetings, dictating the mode of presentation isn’t going to do it. Eliminating PowerPoint might make a difference in the short term, as it would jar some people out of a rut, and force them to actually think about what they’re doing, but in a few years, those people will settle down into a slightly different rut, and you’ll get bad presentations done with chalk, or overhead slides, or interpretive dance, or whatever other mode you might require. <\/p>\n

If you want to improve the quality of presentations at scientific meetings, you need to actively reward people for giving good presentations. Which is much harder than railing against any particular piece of software.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Effect Measure, Revere (or one of the Reveres, anyway, I’m not certain if they’re plural or not) has posted another broadside against PowerPoint, calling it “the scourge of modern lecturing.” This is something of a sensitive point for me, as I use PowerPoint for my lectures in the introductory classes. I’ve been using… Continue reading A Good Craftsman Never Blames His Tools<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,36,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-meetings","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}