Absolute(ly not) PowerPoint

My students have created their blogs this week, and now we are poised to blog together, as it were. In other words, I have asked all of them to respond to a common prompt on their blogs. In the spirit of the late Jim Corder, I will try responding to my own assignments alongside my students. This will either make me look brilliant or stupid; I'm willing to take that risk.

So, this week, I asked them to respond to a nifty little essay called "Absolute PowerPoint" by Ian Parker (it appeared in The New Yorker several years ago); you can find it all over the Internet; here's one link http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/group/powerpt.html

I hadn't read this essay in a few years; the most vivid memory I had of it was a Stanford Professor saying that he did not assign his students Steven Johnson's Interface Culture because he could not PowerPoint it (note the I am using "PowerPoint" as a verb here - ugh!). The memory of that incident has made me abhor that professor and PowerPoint as an educational medium ever since (I have actually never put anything into PowerPoint because of that vivid story).

When I went back a re-read the article, I found a passage that I could really get behind, that I could "believe in," as we have been saying in class, and that encapsulated my distaste for PowerPoint in academia (please note that I am limiting my argument to its use as a teaching tool in higher ed):

But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion-an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion-about the way we should think. It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize,
how to look at the world.

When Malcolm McLuhan claimed that "the medium is the message" he was arguing that media, especially new media, can influence the ways in which we think about and use information. PowerPoint strikes me as a perfect example. It is not that the medium of PowerPoint is more important than the content of a particular presentation, it is that the medium itself has shaped how we communicate with each other. We even use it as a verb to describe commnication practices (see my comment above). Parker states that PowerPoint "makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world." The medium has impacted the kinds of messages we choose to create. PowerPoint does not accommodate discursivity. Professor Nass eliminated Johnson's book because it was not linear enough!

In higher education, we cannot let the glitzy appeal of PowerPoint force us to give up the instructive tangent and the non-linear text! Parker says the PowerPoint "edits thoughts" by limiting the kinds of arguments that will "fit" into the PowerPoint mold. I don't want the medium editing the thoughts; I want the students editing the thoughts -- their own, mine, and the thoughts of the authors we read.

I'm going to step back now and explicate my own post by describing my writing process and doing a bit of rhetorical analysis of my own text (in an effort to model for my students).

As I was reading the essay, I copied passages that really hit me (positively or negatively) into a Word file. When I finished reading, I went to my file and selected the passage above. Upon re-reading it, it thought of McLuhan's claim. To demonstrate how my "belief" in this passage was shaped, I called upon two other sources: McLuhan's claim (which we talked about earlier this semester) and another passage in Parker's essay about the professor dropping Interface Culture from his syllabus.

I then showed how these three passages connected and made sense for me. I directly quoted one passage from Parker; I summarized the passage about Professor Nass, and I paraphrased McLuhan. In addition to showing readers how I see these ideas connecting, I stuck my neck out and made a mini-argument (PowerPoint has no place in academic instruction).

Now I just need to figure out how to fix the alignment in this post . . .