PowerPoint may not be entirely ubiquitous, but it’s getting pretty close to industry standard in both teaching and presenting. This is particularly true in my field, which I attribute to the tech-savviness and –enthusiasm of IP folks. That said, I’ve resisted using PowerPoint ever since I started teaching. The primary reason is that my experience with PowerPoint slides as a student was uniformly negative. Profs who used them tended to become dependent on them, lecturing straight off the slides rather than engaging in the kind of spontaneous discussion that characterized my most rewarding and memorable law school classes. The presence of the slides—which were often handed out in class and made available online—also tended to become a crutch or replacement for note-taking. Lots of students would simply skip class when they figured out that the sessions were largely redundant with the slides.
When I started planning my classes, I talked to some colleagues (law and otherwise) about PowerPoint slides, and got a generally negative reaction. A good friend who works as a producer for a major internet company said that his company had recently announced a policy of actively discouraging PowerPoint, on the theory that it led to mechanical presentations and caused audiences to be passive receptors of information rather than active listeners (he mentioned a study showing that when speakers use PowerPoint, listeners tend to remember only what’s in the slides, regardless of how important other information is). A few law colleagues also related their disappointment with professors’ use of PowerPoint in class for most of the reasons I mentioned above.
More about my conversion after the fold.
So during my first year of teaching (copyright and property) I kicked it fully old-school: just me and the dry-erase board, PowerPoint be damned. Though I don’t have a point of comparison, I do feel that using only spare written notes in class forced me to be more spontaneous and to focus on discussion rather than talking at students. However, this came at a cost: whenever I wanted to use a diagram, or pose a complex hypothetical, or invite the class to take apart the language of a statute, I either had to write it out on the board, or produce a handout, or repeat myself ad nauseam.
Over the summer, as I was thinking about how to improve on teaching my classes from the previous year, I came to the realization that my rejection of PowerPoint may have been too categorical. The fact that some users become dependent on it does not mean it cannot be employed effectively. So this time around, I’m going to use slides, but only for three purposes.
First, very very big picture points. Presenting too much detail causes students to tune out, but I’m hoping that outlining major themes at a very high level of generality will remind them what they should take down without providing so much content that the slide supplants the need to take down information (i.e., “Three rationales for copyright: utility, natural rights, personhood”—this doesn’t tell you what each of these means, but does provide much needed organization for class discussion). Second, for illustrations—visual or otherwise—that necessitate sustained focus on an image or language. Certainly this is true where a statute or hypothetical is being discussed in detail, but is also invaluable in copyright, where detailed comparisons of visual or structural features of works of authorship lies at the core of infringement analysis. Third, entertainment. This point was inspired by a very good job talk I saw last year where the speaker used PowerPoint slides not as a mechanical summary of the content of the talk, but to play off that content with images that provided a fun counter-narrative alongside the presentation. That said, if anyone has any suggestions for ways to create an entertaining visual counter-narrative for the rule against perpetuities, please let me know.
So that is the story of my (partial) conversion. There was no major epiphany, really, but rather just a realization that like all innovations, PowerPoint can be used well or poorly, so the point is not that it should or shouldn’t be used in class, but rather that it can be a help or a hindrance depending on the particular user. I am, of course, still experimenting with incorporating PowerPoint slides into class, so if anyone has suggestions about how best to do this, I’d love to hear them.
Posted by Dave_Fagundes on August 16, 2008 at 04:49 PM
Comments
One of the advantages of actually drawing a diagram on the board is that it provides the pedagogical benefit of a pregnant pause. In other words, many professors speak too quickly or pause too infrequently to let the information sink in. Having to write a diagram on the board is a way to force the professor to give the students a moment, while still holding their attention because they are trying to see what is being drawn (as opposed to the tech glitches that sometimes occur, which give everyone a moment, but don’t hold their attention). There are, of course, other benefits. For example, a diagram on the board can easily be altered to change the hypothetical or to respond to student questions. Not so easy to do that on the fly with Power Point (although perhaps less cumbersom with other software such as mind manager).
Posted by: Anon | Aug 18, 2008 12:14:11 PM
Never one to shirk a visual challenge, I’d say:
http://bp2.blogger.com/_LQjPtqB6zCs/R8ABITsnhrI/AAAAAAAABkM/e5GxzRPpm_w/s320/Dead+Man%27s+Hand.jpg
Best, Tb.
Posted by: Thomas R. Bruce | Aug 17, 2008 9:15:30 AM
The essential truth of PowerPoint is that there should be a narrative behind it. If you can’t tell a convincing story about why you’re using slides at all, you shouldn’t use them. If you can’t convincingly fit each slide into that story, it shouldn’t be in the deck. That means that slides should never be something just thrown together; the theory about how a particular style of slides will cognitively help your audience has to come first, after which, the slide design choices are highly constrained. Larry Lessig and Stephen Colbert are both brilliant in their use of PowerPoint-like visuals; each working under a completely different but equally rigorous aesthetic theory.
Posted by: James Grimmelmann | Aug 17, 2008 8:59:51 AM
(he mentioned a study showing that when speakers use PowerPoint, listeners tend to remember only what’s in the slides, regardless of how important other information is)
The obvious lesson to be learned from this study: put *everything* in the slides!
Posted by: Bruce Boyden | Aug 16, 2008 7:19:27 PM