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PowerPoint-based lectures are creating a generation of uncritical thinkers

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PowerPoints tend to dumb down the classroom.

Andrew Smith recently published an editorial in The Guardian accusing PowerPoint of killing critical thought and engagement in classrooms. While I always advocated for this position as a student, as a sessional instructor I still couldn’t agree more.

In my first year at SFU, a sessional prof, Stephen Ogden, polled our English 150 class, asking if we’d like to have lecture slides posted online. The class used blogs as a means of out-of-class communication and for participation marks, something I argued against online, saying that learning to note-take is a skill and as students at a university, we should be competent in this.

This was not a popular opinion, so much so that one anonymous classmate proceeded to harass me online, posting responses like “I’m going to kill your whole family” on every subsequent post I made, but with poor grammar and spelling. I like to think that alone proved my point.

There are some profs who can use PowerPoint more successfully, as Smith notes, but they tend to only use them for purely visual accompaniments.

I become General Colin Powell, master of those in front of me when I use Powerpoints because I put a picture of a map of Canada beside the word ‘regionalism’ instead of writing it on the board. There’s no difference in my lecturing styles; frankly if I don’t have a PowerPoint, I often put more effort into my lecture notes than when I do have visual accompaniment. But for some reason, the visual medium pulls in students and convinces them I’m the expert in the room.

My students demand lecture slides be posted ahead of time, insisting they will use them to take notes, and then forget or don’t print them off. Instead, I watch them draw what the slides look like and then take notes off of those instead of just writing abbreviated thoughts down the page.

This could just be an example of visual learning, but I feel like an inability to piece together small concepts and visualize the connections between them is the opposite of what any teacher hopes for. I want them to infer headings and subheadings when I lecture, but there’s only so much one slide can contain.

Maybe programs like Prezi subvert this and use visuality to show those connections, but the effort on the instructor’s behalf to make something like that every week is huge, and again, shows content in a passive way rather than engaging students in a process of learning.

It’s being able to describe those networks and their significances that are key to critical thinking and higher learning, and if that ability isn’t being exercised, critical thinking skills don’t seem to be at play, at least in the context of humanities and social sciences.

This past week I gave in to my students’ demands and agreed to give them topics for their first (very short) essays. It kills me to do this after reminding them every week they need to think about what they could write with regards to any of the readings I give them.

Almost half of them have already come up with their own topics, but for the rest, I wish I knew how to convince them that they are all capable of having original thoughts and they are capable of writing a sustained argument about them.

Maybe I just need to incorporate more inspirational poster lecture slides.

1 COMMENT

  1. Powerpoint slides are great for presenting information on a topic or concept if done properly. The issue is that now they’ve become instead of a presentation a repository of information like a textbook with little value on how the information is presented. As an instructor, I often receive kits for students and in one of my kits all of the slides were simply bullets with text descriptions. That could have been changed into a one page word document as a reference sheet, there is no way to make an effective presentation of huge amounts of bullets and text based reference items and have a student learn from that format. When I see instructors reading Powerpoint slides like that to a class…#facepalm

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