Always Another Windmill

I got to sign up for this course last week. I’m very excited–I’ve been wanting to go to one of Edward Tufte’s courses for a few years now. For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, he is a highly respected figure in the fields of information design and visual analysis, to name just a few (he’s also a noted critic of PowerPoint). He’s now in semi retirement, and does a lot of sculpture and other interesting things these days, as well as working on books and teaching these one day classes.

Getting to go to this course was a minor personal triumph at work –there was a last minute call that went out for proposals for professional development funds, and not only am I going to one of the classes up here in Boston, but there’s a whole contingent from the office in Chapel Hill going to one down there later in March.

Now, I doubt it will get people to drop powerpoint altogether, but maybe we’ll get slightly smarter use of it?

Hey, a windmill tilter can dream . . .

(via a passing reference on Making Light)

Take one LCD Projector, a folder full of random powerpoint presentations downloaded from the web.  The more random the better. Load up a presentation, and contestants free improv a presentation to accompany the slides, without any knowledge of what the next slide will be. Why am I not surprised that this latest ultra-geek fad got started in Germany (which apparently remains the center of its popularity)?

Best use of Powerpoint I’ve ever seen.

It turns out it’s not just you. Powerpoint slides accompanying a talk may actually make it harder for the audience to retain the information presented, according to recent research done at the University of New South Wales, Australia. (I’m still looking for the original paper to get more details.) The researcher found that being presented with the same information in written and spoken form simultaneously can overload our ability to process and hold that information in short term memory.

Their findings also have interesting implications for liturgists. From the article in the Sydney Morning Herald:

[The study] also questions the wisdom of centuries-old habits, such as reading along with Bible passages, at the same time they are being read aloud in church. More of the passages would be understood and retained, the researchers suggest, if heard or read separately.

I’ve not been a fan of having the congregation follow along in the liturgy with a complete script, and I have to restrain myself from cringing when there’s an audible page turn during one of the readings in the liturgy as everyone in the congregation dutifully flips the page to read along with what’s being read to them. Seriously, in what other context do we have adults read along with the full text of what’s being said?

Now I have evidence to support my crankiness.

As far as Powerpoint itself goes, it shouldn’t really be news anymore that Powerpoint presentations are generally the antithesis of good communication. I suspect anyone who has been subjected to enough of them has come to this conclusion independently, but if not, Edward Tufte has been on this for years now, detailing some of the many ways that Powerpoint is a corrupting influence on information presentation (for example in The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, and scattered throughout his books, including a chapter in his most recent book, Beautiful Evidence).

That’s assuming, of course, that you think that the purpose of a presentation is to inform or to communicate.  If the purpose of the presentation is to confuse, obfuscate, or convince the audience that the material is too confusing for them, but that the presenter has it well in hand–also known as “engineering assent,” or, as a colleague of mine recently put it “facipulation” (facilitation + manipulation)–then Powerpoint is the perfect tool. (For an excellent discussion of the history behind this, see this post at Naked Capitalism).

And don’t let me get started on the actual use of Powerpoint in liturgy.