PowerPoint as a Crutch (8 comments)
I just got back from an all-staff meeting. Since I wasn't particularly interested in the content of the presentation (actually, I felt a bit insulted by it), I found myself nitpicking the style. I noticed that the presenter, like so many others, had taken to counting on PowerPoint to convey the body of the presentation. PowerPoint was the focal point and she was providing side comments.
I think that's wrong. A slideshow should be auxiliary. It should contain information that's difficult to present through speech alone. Even when it's used to present an outline, it should be a series of ideas to guide the speaker through their discourse. I stopped paying attention to the PowerPoint for a while and found that I had no idea what the topic of the presentation was since all I could here were sentence fragments acknowledging the progression of bullet points on the screen. Ignoring the content, it was a horrible presentation, and I hate the idea that such things are common practice.
Along the lines of being saddened by common practice, I was thinking last week about Ben Stein. He's a smart guy and strongly Republican, having worked as a speechwriter for Nixon. It makes me wonder what that generation of politically-informed people think about the Neocon takeover of the Republican party. Following that, I get sad thinking of all the people who were fans of the old ways of the Republicans who are more or less being duped into supporting Bush through their ignorance of how things have changed.
Politics aside, I'm finally going to stop whining and get some new tires. It should be a nice improvement, along with the new air filter that's coming with my 30,000 mile maintenance.