Maybe I am just in a bad mood… but I am so tired of superficial condemnations of PowerPoint. I read another one tonight here. I don’t know Kathy Sierra… and I am sure she is a swell person… but I don’t understand why people feel compelled to write these kind of articles. Kathy acknowledges that she is not an expert in this area, so why bother. She quotes Tufte’s writing quite a bit whose work is interesting, but is unsupported conjecture without any solid scientific foundation.
The truth is that there is absolutely no empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of various kinds of PPT visuals or the effectiveness of PPT versus other presentation mediums. You may suggest that a bullet list or other text-based visual is not effective… but it is only opinion because there is no scientific evidence to support this. There have been some limited, superficial attempts to study the effectiveness of certain types of presentations… but these efforts so far have not been very satisfying. I think some thoughtful and well designed foundational studies need to be done in this area.
Sorry for the rant. Chock it up to a long hot North Carolina day.
Posted by Robert Befus at 7:58 PM .