Rethinking the Lecture
This session helps faculty members prepare engaging multimedia lecture presentations, incorporating visual communication techniques and active learning strategies. Participants review research and analysis of classroom presentations, learn guiding principles for active digital lectures, and use Keynote to create several multimedia lecture slides for their own work.
Faculty members have used slides to enhance their lectures since the development of the magic lantern in the 19th century. The ubiquity of computers and projectors in college classrooms has mushroomed this type of presentation to the extent that we worry about its effectiveness. How can we make sure we are taking full advantage of digital technology in our lecture slides? How can we avoid the powerpointlessness that students complain about? How can we use presentation technology to make our lectures more active and engaging?
This session will explore these questions, providing practical tips and guided practice in the development of digital lectures. The session begins with a critical analysis of computer presentations, and then goes on to propose some principles for developing effective slide shows that avoid the most dangerous pitfalls. This is followed by hands-on work to develop a new presentation for a favorite lecture of your own.
By the conclusion of this session, you will:
- Engage in a critical analysis of computer-based lecture presentations.
- Know the key principles for preparing effective digital lectures that employ active learning techniques.
- Learn to use common presentation-preparation tools such as iPhoto and Keynote.
- Apply these findings to the development of several slides for your own lecture.
Edward Tufte of Yale is the grand master emeritus of information design and a curmudgeonly critic of the way teachers and business people use computer presentations. In 2003 his articles sparked a debate that has helped to raise the level of discussion of how best to use the new digital technology for lectures. Read at least two of these brief and pithy volleys in the PowerPoint wars, to hone your critical skills.
- PowerPoint is Evil, by Edward Tufte, in Wired magazine. This is the article that started it all. Even better is Tufte’s 32-page illustrated booklet on the topic, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, available for purchase in printed form at Tufte's web site. His metaphor of Josef Stalin and bullet points is entertaining.
- In Defense of PowerPoint, by Don Norman. Norman’s response to Tufte’s criticism presents the positive side of presentation technology, and reminds us to differentiate personal notes, illustrative slides, and handouts, which are often confused in the typical lecture slide show.
- How to Bore People to Death with PowerPoint, a comedy sketch with Don McMillan.
- We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint, an article from the New York Times on the misuse of PowerPoint in the Army in Iraq.
Review the advice of colleagues
Assuming that Tufte has not converted you away from the subject of this seminar, review two of the following collections of advice from fellow institutions of higher education, on how to best use digital lecture tools.
Review a sample slide show
Take a look at how Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address might have appeared had he prepared it with the PowerPoint Presentation Wizard, rather than on the back of an envelope in pencil. See The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation, 11/19/1863. There are times when a few words are worth a thousand fancy slides.
Discuss basic issues of digital lectures
In a small group with your colleagues, reflect on this observation from the University of Minnesota Center for Teaching and Learning, excerpted from the reading listed above:
There are both positive and negative aspects to using PowerPoint in the classroom. First, the positives. PowerPoint is easy for professors to update, saving them time and energy. It's neat and clean, and it allows for "portability" of materials. Professors can take slides from one lecture, update them, include them in another lecture, and share them with colleagues or students. It also provides a platform for incorporating a variety of different kinds of multi-media file-types: images, video, audio, and animations.
There are also drawbacks to using PowerPoint as a teaching tool. PowerPoint, when used incorrectly, can encourage student (and teacher) passivity by discouraging interaction between them. Professors often overload slides with information, forcing them to move through the material too quickly while overwhelming students with details. This can sometimes discourage students and lead them to stop listening to the lecture altogether.
As you discuss, refer to the concepts presented in the PowerPoint controversy. Focus on these questions:
- If PowerPoint is so bad, why do we use it?
- How can we save ourselves from powerpointlessness?
Your seminar leader will ask your group for its responses to these two questions.
While many college faculty would disagree with Edward Tufte’s claim that presentation software is inherently evil, we must nonetheless strive to use these new tools in ways that respect our audience and take full advantage of the digital opportunities they offer. By keeping in mind three basic concepts: Idea, Activity, and Simplicity, we can make our lecture presentations at least benign and possibly provocative.
Idea
Lectures are about ideas, not about words. Use slides to provoke and communicate the ideas behind the words you are saying. Don’t use slides to mimic your words. Wherever possible, use images to communicate ideas, rather than words. Distill your concepts down to a single picture and a single word -- this works much better in a group presentation environment. Provide details through your narration, not through text on the screen.
Sentences belong in books, not on slides. If you want people to read complete sentences and paragraphs, write a book, or hand them out on paper, or put them on a web page they can look at later. In large-group presentations, use images or single words on the screen to represent your ideas, and speak the sentences with your voice. This is more natural, it keeps the audience paying attention to you, and it avoids squinting. The best presentations aim to use one word per bullet.
Activity
Use slides to get your audience thinking and working.
- Show them two images side by side and ask them to compare.
- Show a photograph and ask a question.
- Present an image that’s a non sequitor to surprise them.
- Show a series of images, and ask them to predict what will come next.
- Follow Edward Tufte's advice: “Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side.”
Whenever possible, let the audience see and hear one idea at a time -- don't present a screenful of words or pictures all at once. Speak slowly. Pause between ideas to let them sink in. Take questions as they arise. Provoke controversy and invite comments from the audience. Interactivity works, if you know how to promote and manage it. At the end, step away from the computer and tell them what you just told them -- they will appreciate this oral summary.
Simplicity
Avoid clutter and complexity. It's easy to place a pretty picture as the background of every slide, or to choose a complex pattern from the slide design menu. But in most cases these add little value, and more often than not serve to make the text of the slide difficult to decipher, and to distract the viewer from your critical images. Choose a plain background, or none at all.
Be merciful. A lecture with 45 slides can be torture to its audience, especially if all the slides show exactly the same style of sets of bulleted text. Vary the style and format of slides. Use images to illustrate your ideas. Let your voice do the talking -- you need not include every word on the slides. Leave a slide up for several minutes as you explain it, and discuss its essential ideas with the class. Let the slides show only the key ideas, represented by images, single words, or short phrases. Consider limiting yourself to one slide for every four minutes of lecture. Parsimony is one of the heavenly virtues.
It was a very pretty font called Edwardian Script. But the audience squinted as it tried to decipher the words on the projection screen. The folks in the back had no clue what was on the slides.
Edwardian Script might be appropriate for a wedding invitation to be printed on paper, but not for a slide show to be displayed at a distance. The most readable fonts for slide shows are plain, blocky styles such as Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana. The more curlicues and decoration a font has, the more difficult its legibility at a distance.
After we changed to Verdana, and set the text in a larger size (anything smaller than 18 points will not be visible in an auditorium), the audience was bright-eyed and beneficent.
A slide show works better if you stick to a single simple font style, and use one font size for all titles (such as 36-point), and another for all bullets (such as 24-point), throughout the slide show.
K.I.S.S.
In this section of the seminar, you take an existing slide show, from your own collection or from your colleagues’, and analyze it according to the principles of idea, activity, and simplicity. How do they rate? How might they be improved?
Remember the advice of the authors of the Communication Insight article cited above:
PowerPoint is not the cause of poorly planned, disorganized presentations; instead, a bad PowerPoint presentation is a symptom of the writer’s failure to employ simple slide design principles, basic communication skills, and—most importantly—fundamental rhetorical techniques.
In this last part of the seminar, you will apply the principles listed above to the development of three ample slides for one of your lectures. Take a bold step and rethink the nature of the lecture and the role of the slides. Follow these steps:
1. Plan three slides.
First, think about your audience:
What does my audience need to know? What point am I trying to make? How do I make that point clearly, thoroughly, transparently? And is the organization of information effective for making my point clear and understandable? (from Communication Insight, cited above)
Second, think about the idea you want to teach in these three slides. Consider creating slides that compare images, or pose questions, rather than simply presenting information.
Third, storyboard your three slides. List the images and text you’ll need for each.
2. Gather materials. Take the list of images and other resources from your storyboard, and gather them up onto your computer. Best place to put them is into your iPhoto or iTunes library.
3. Learn Keynote. Ask your seminar leader to show you the ropes, or learn on your own with an online tutorial.
Using PowerPoint? If you are beginner, refer to this introductory getting-started article for step-by-step advice on the mechanics of building a slide show: How to Make a Slide Show with PowerPoint.
4. Develop your lecture slides. Follow the principles we have been discussing.
From Edward Tufte:
Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side.
the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding. This is especially so for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons.
Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical stupidity.
From Don Norman:
A lecture should have three different documents:
1. Personal Notes, to be seen only by the speaker, and used as a reminder of the topics and key points, or perhaps of the "bon mot," the clever, felicitously worded phrase that can appear spontaneously witty to the crowd, but which works best if it is prepared and practiced in advance, for few of us are good enough to actually think of them on the spot.
2. Illustrative slides. These slides should illustrate the major points and help motivate the listener. Tufte is apt to complain that this is simply "entertainment," but I respond that if the audience is not entertained, they are not apt to listen, and what good is a cleverly drafted talk if the audience is not listening. The illustrations should be relevant. They should convey new information. But they need not have words. They might have data, they might have graphs, they might have photographs of the product, equipment, phenomenon, or other aspect of the point under discussion. They should add to the talk, not distract from it.
3. Handouts. Here is where the speaker can put the references, the data, the appendices to the talk. Here is where one should indeed follow Tufte's advice and provide clear, detailed information that the reader can use later on to remember the points of the talk as well as to go on to further study and analysis.
From Communication Insight:
PowerPoint is not the cause of poorly planned, disorganized presentations; instead, a bad PowerPoint presentation is a symptom of the writer’s failure to employ simple slide design principles, basic communication skills, and—most importantly— fundamental rhetorical techniques.
Ask yourself, ““What does my audience need to know? What point am I trying to make? How do I make that point clearly, thoroughly, transparently? And is the organization of information effective for making my point clear and understandable?”
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