Powerpoint
11/09/06 15:57 |Personal-English
Got sick of Powerpoint. Yes. Another YES.
I thought I had escaped from it, saving my sanity with Apple's amazing Keynote (part of its iWork suite, one of the original reasons I bought my first PowerBook). However, reality told me I haven't and probably can't.
Recently I have to attend lots of student seminar (not my own lab's seminar, almost everyone uses Keynote and blackboard here). Most of them with poorly made Powerpoint presentation. Oops, sorry, mostly there aren't presentation either. Most of them are slide-reading driods.
I took a hard look at Powerpoint 2007 beta, from a Human-Computer Interaction and Usability point of view. I looked hard at the interface and how it dictates a user's workflow, and I found out something that shocked me.
In Keynote, here is the main interface (I turned on Text option, normally I use Icon-only here):
Things are pretty obvious. As someone who often give presentation & lecture, here are things I do the most: Add more slides, and Present it. I generally, from time to time, has to rearrange the view, change the theme for a certain slide, and use different master slide layout.
I looked at Powerpoint 2007, here's terror:
What? Well, no wonder. Most students I saw in the seminar made their slides by pasting text from somewhere, most notably Word Documents and Web Sites. And where is the Present mode button?
I searched for it, and it is located near the bottom right of the screen. A tiny button, obscurity compared to the Paste panel:
Well, no wonder. Student are NOT giving presentation. Not only students but lots of lecturers also teach by slide-reading and bullet-mumbling. Presentation is not important from Powerpoint perspective.
Powerpoint not only accounted for destroying one's ability to give present creatively, it also destroy imagination. No longer would one have to think creative and build the world up from a black backboard, no longer things will be visual. Everything is bulleted, listed, and worded. This encourages rote-memorization more than anything else.
So, if I have a chance to single out a worse source of disaster for this generation's level of education, creativity in work, and imagination, I'd single out Powerpoint without any hesitation.
[Note to self: maybe you are just sick of seeing too much poorly-made presentations, too many slide-reading students (who probably seeing too many lecturers doing that), too many bullets.
I thought I had escaped from it, saving my sanity with Apple's amazing Keynote (part of its iWork suite, one of the original reasons I bought my first PowerBook). However, reality told me I haven't and probably can't.
Recently I have to attend lots of student seminar (not my own lab's seminar, almost everyone uses Keynote and blackboard here). Most of them with poorly made Powerpoint presentation. Oops, sorry, mostly there aren't presentation either. Most of them are slide-reading driods.
I took a hard look at Powerpoint 2007 beta, from a Human-Computer Interaction and Usability point of view. I looked hard at the interface and how it dictates a user's workflow, and I found out something that shocked me.
In Keynote, here is the main interface (I turned on Text option, normally I use Icon-only here):
Things are pretty obvious. As someone who often give presentation & lecture, here are things I do the most: Add more slides, and Present it. I generally, from time to time, has to rearrange the view, change the theme for a certain slide, and use different master slide layout.
I looked at Powerpoint 2007, here's terror:
What? Well, no wonder. Most students I saw in the seminar made their slides by pasting text from somewhere, most notably Word Documents and Web Sites. And where is the Present mode button?
I searched for it, and it is located near the bottom right of the screen. A tiny button, obscurity compared to the Paste panel:
Well, no wonder. Student are NOT giving presentation. Not only students but lots of lecturers also teach by slide-reading and bullet-mumbling. Presentation is not important from Powerpoint perspective.
Powerpoint not only accounted for destroying one's ability to give present creatively, it also destroy imagination. No longer would one have to think creative and build the world up from a black backboard, no longer things will be visual. Everything is bulleted, listed, and worded. This encourages rote-memorization more than anything else.
So, if I have a chance to single out a worse source of disaster for this generation's level of education, creativity in work, and imagination, I'd single out Powerpoint without any hesitation.
[Note to self: maybe you are just sick of seeing too much poorly-made presentations, too many slide-reading students (who probably seeing too many lecturers doing that), too many bullets.