I urge students in my Social Aspects of Information Systems class to use the “tool neutrality” argument with caution, as I consider it just this side of logical fallacy. Nevertheless, as often as not they cling just as tightly to tool neutrality as to their beloved slippery slope. And in a more highly politicized context, admittedly the argument is not without its appeal. One certainly can’t fault the Nachos, Rifles, and Alcohol Association their “guns don’t kill people” given its ideological expediency but when someone in class starts going on about how some software and/or system or other is “just a tool” and can be used just as readily for good or for evil, as though that ends the discussion, or should, I get a bit testy.

Sure, one could just as readily use PowerPoint to create “art” as to bore the bejesus out of a class, a department, a battalion, but we all know PowerPoint is evil at this point, don’t we? And I’m not asking that it be acknowledged as such, just that we see it as a force that has altered, deeply and as a practical matter irrevocably, what transpires in the classroom.

Nothing could on the surface of it be more innocuous: PowerPoint is MS Word with landscape orientation, colored background and big default font. Only with the clarity of retrospect is it anything but a trifle. And yet it changed the nature of education (and business, and the military…) — for better or worse?

I’ve a morbid fear of being old and especially of nostalgia, and I worry this plays a role in my sense of this. Either way, in my person experience from both sides of the lectern PowerPoint has been an utter pox on the classroom. My info 215 students nearly without exception back me up on this (although they [reasonably enough] tend [largely out of naked self interest I daresay] to agree with me when I get cranked up, as I surely do when the topic turns to PowerPoint).

My beefs differ from Tufte’s but seem so played out I’m reluctant to detail them. Nevertheless:

• PPT creates a leaden air of inevitability, a branch-less tree from root to leaf that not even overhead slides can match. We will begin at slide one, spend precisely 3 minutes per slide, and commence after slide 40, class without end, amen. Can I get a “Next Slide Please”? Testify!
• Nothing stifles engagement, interaction, giving a rat’s ass about class as it transpires quite like orthodox PowerPoint use.
• While nobody likes to have to scribble furious notes in a vain effort to preserve what is said in class, only to have the proceedings rendered incomprehensible and thus elusive in large part via the effort to retain them, there are major adverse consequences to providing students with slide deck archives.
  • If as a student one feels safe in the fact that having the slide deck will provide you the gist of things, there is a natural, perhaps inevitable tendency to tune out; While my evidence is strictly anecdotal, I’d argue this holds for most.
  • Yes, note taking can be a burden, but a tremendously valuable one because a) fear (of missing something critical) is a powerful motivator, b) taking notes is a beneficial mental discipline and c) it forces real time engagement with the material, which opens the door for better interaction. (This is perhaps my strongest conviction, but also the one that sets my auto-nostalgia alarm off most urgently.

  The PowerPoint-enabled inner dialog goes something like this: “OK, I’m here, but I’m tired, still more than a tad hung over, and my various personal crises are wearing on me to such an extent that really someone ought to pin a medal on me for just being here. I’ll stick around in case something earth-shatteringly profound, interesting or otherwise unusual goes down, but otherwise I’m giving myself the next three hours off mentally. I have the slides anyway, I’ll pick this up after the fact, when I’m in a better place.” (A bit overwrought for a hypothetical, you might say, but I’ve seen expressions on *many* of my students over the years, a subset of whom are a hardworking and thoughtful lot, that says, picture worth a thousand words style, precisely this, verbatim.

All but the rarest of us possess enormous inertia that must be overcome before participation in an instance of classroom space-time, membership in that ephemeral (potentially magical) little community becomes meaningful. PowerPoint *does* *not* *help* overcome that inertia.