Tonight at the dinner I hosted (an all French affair), one of our two guests surprised me during the dessert course (chocolate mousses):

Do you have Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence? My wife and I just bought The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. We’re inspired since our company bought us his PowerPoint missive.

Whoa. I shook my head. “Yes, I do!” I told them, knowing that the PowerPoint piece is actually a part of Beautiful Evidence. We then discussed some particulars then the merits of Power Point.

Mr. Tufte isn’t fond of the business world’s favorite presentation software. When I speak of PPT in this entry, however, I might as well be talking about all of them, my favorite Keynote included. I use Keynote a lot, in fact, because I love it’s fit and finish. But it’s important to note that I create “Keynotes” for real, honest to goodness face-to-face workshops or presentations.

This guy’s company is using PPTs as the general medium of communication between employees. In a given day, you might be assigned to “report” on something, and to do that, you’ll create a “stack,” or in other words, a PPT.

My friend couldn’t really defend PPTs used in this way, nor could he replace it with something better. “Written reports ala Tufte would be too long for us to read…” So, it’s not just us surfers on the Internet who have trained ourselves to only accommodate quick, easy reads to get information. Businesses today too are too information stressed. They need their information in short, concise, trustworthy chunks. But is PPT the best tool?

Over the years I’ve become less and less enthusiastic about our children using PPT in schools. I’m not against slides and all, it’s mainly the approach behind it. Teachers consider a PPT done a great triumph! “My kids just created an honest to goodness Power Point! Wow!”

The tool is dead easy to use (at least to the level that matches so much of what you can find folks making, already, online). There’s no wonderment that our kids can produce these things. But why make one? Producing a concise, short, trustworthy sequence of information might be a nice skill to have. But if we are to really focus on the tool, then ought we not to really go all-hog and use these tools to produce compelling stories that arrest our attention?

Many PPTs fail to engage on their own. Yet we can find millions for free download online, for sure. “I missed that workshop, was there a PPT available?” I’ve looked through some. I can get through them quickly. But I miss a lot, because they are not, really, designed to be viewed or read alone. There’s supposed to be a person delivering a message.

My friend’s company writes theirs without a talking head; the slides do the talking. Now I see why they’re sharing Tuftian writings: maybe, like his now classic example, they can learn from NASAs mistake of using PPT as the communication medium du jour.

The problem with so many PPTs is that they of course have their template-based format of titles, bullets, and occasionally, a PPT might include a graph that Tufte would label “chartjunk.” For the given size and number of pixels, the graphic displays are too light on data, too much on pseudo-art.

So, while the tool isn’t necessarily the problem, the way it too easily makes it easy to use poorly is a real problem. To give you an example, let’s take one teacher’s migration from PPT one year to the “new” Keynote the next.

“John, where’s the clip art in Keynote?” I told her: “Ah, they don’t include any. They did in the first version, but now, there isn’t any.”

“Oh, can I use PPT’s clipart?”

This is where my facial expression must have been interesting. I don’t like clip art. Based upon research I learned about in graduate school, I use my past experience to lobby support against clip art (ca). “Well, you really don’t want to use that,” I said, bravely.

“Oh, but I do… see, I have empty space here, I could put a picture of a teacher or something pointing to these bullets.”

I can’t explain how much I wanted to scream, running from the room. These are the same folks who might turn around another day and tell me what I told them, only twisted in some bad version. “You told us to use visuals to grab the students’ attention… that’s why I need clip art!”

Information comes to our eyes, and consequently, our brains, in three levels. There are visual representations, iconic ones, and then abstract ones. Language is an abstraction: it takes more time for us to decode words, our symbols of language, then to decode analogues of what we can see with our eyes. In other words, if you want to communicate the concept of a banana to me with a visual medium,

• the quickest way for me to understand would be to show me a real photograph of a banana (or a real, honest to goodness banana),
• then with some decoding, some line art of a banana (icon),
• and then, finally, the word banana written in Hobo font, 56 pt.

Just kidding on the font and size.

It’s not surprising that other cultures have turned to picture-based languages (think the Maya, Egyptians, or Chinese).

So, yes, Keynote doesn’t come with clipart. It’s a travesty for some. But it’s easy to important your digital photos into Keynote. But this one example typifies what’s wrong with all PPT software: making animation, adding sounds and soundtracks, let alone professional-level effects, is outside the domain of your average slide pusher. In fact, some folks are so lazy when it comes to creating PPTs that they simply steal the artwork, bullets, and whole slides of their colleagues (or strangers via the Internet) to build their message.

The problem is, I have a hunch we respond better to visual presentations that engage our aesthetics. Keynote’s full-frame images are better than Microsoft’s c.a., but a stack of images alone doesn’t necessarily make for a best-in-class effort. The PPTs that most closely mimic video are likely the best, but that again, takes special skills and time.

So, what’s the best medium for teaching people? Whether you listen to a teacher, watch a video, or read slides, these are all passive experiences for the majority of students. Interactive white boards take the PPT metaphor and improve it slightly: now things are made to move and be moved, and you can get out of your chair to do it.

Progressives in education for years have pointed to constructionism as the improvement on our educational model. It for one makes the activity of learning far more active than listening to a PPT on a screen. To wrap up my thoughts on the PPT debate I began to try and distill, let me offer a few concluding thoughts.

1. PPT isn’t evil. It’s a fair idea taken into too many bad domains. Unless you have the finesse of a media producer, you best only use PPTs for your public speaking engagements. Don’t lose sight that the presentation is likely you, and the slides are merely a support medium.
2. PPTs can be used in education. By teachers, they ought to supplement times teachers are delivering new information or important instructions with non-verbal, visual re-inforcement. For students, they can be a scaffold for aiding research, public speaking, or as a media authoring tool (where the effects of media on an audience is a strong consideration of the lesson).
3. PPTs would be less dangerous if they were more interactive. If you’re going to use these things like too many teachers do, then we ought to re-think the whole format and be using “slides” (and interactive animations and sound) with interactive tablets, tables, or even within 3D virtual environments.
4. If a written report is too boring for someone, then read the report while you back it up with slides.

As we move forward, I’m anxious to see the solution plaguing my friend who says PPT won out as the medium used daily in his company. As the breadth and depth of information available to us on the Web grows and grows, how will we cope with the shorter attention spans that result from dealing with it all?

I have a feeling the solution is intelligent data miners (some type of software) that evaluates all the data and spits-out summaries. It’s a bit scary. But it may be the thing (type of intelligent decision engine, to borrow Microsoft’s term for their Bing search engine that let’s us sleep in or spend more time outside enjoying chocolate mousse at a picnic.

N.B. To learn more about Professor Edward Tufte’s writings, visit his website.

One of our educational partners in the greater Richmond area is our public television and radio stations under the call sign WCVE. For one, we partner with them to purchase our subscription to Discovery Streaming services (formerly known as United Streaming). Another initiative they started last year was eKlips, which has now received an upgrade and rebranding as ClassroomClips. This is their own version of YouTube, with free content produced by the station, clips from sessions at their annual EdTech conference, and SOL-aligned programming from their partners.

Particularly strong is their content on science and Virginia social studies.

By signing up for a free account, you can save your searches and mark favorite clips for easy access when you return to show them to your students. ClassroomClips is an excellent tool to use to encourage a classroom discussion, present new information, or spark interest at the beginning of a new lesson.

Remember from our LearningHacks last year that starting a lesson with something sticky can go a long way towards helping students retain and remember.

“You’re being flooded with too much information and you can’t selectively filter out quickly which is important and which is not important,” says Goodman. “It only takes a fraction of a second for you to take your eyes off the road and miss the guy making a right-hand turn into your lane.”

CNN ran a story recently on the possibility of danger from trying to multitask. I found the embedded ads for “health.com” to be ridiculous and a bad experiment. But the article should be of some interest to those of us who carry smart phones, have 10 windows open on our laptops, and sometimes sit staring at our desks wondering what’s next.

Aston-Jones says that it’s unclear if some people are drawn to multitasking because that’s the way their brain works, or if multitasking itself causes changes in the brain. And it’s not clear if the brain changes caused by switching attention from YouTube to Google to Twitter and then back to your iPhone — if that is what is occurring — are easily reversed.

With Bea Cantor’s eye and free time at home, we’ve installed some new blog themes, bringing our total to around 100 choices.

Feel free to freshen-up your blog with a new theme, teachers. Go to the Dashboard > Design.

I missed it the first time around, but Google has a promotion running for their RSS aggregator, Google News. It features reading lists of prominent writers and personalities in a diverse set of fields: “news,” food and health, technology, and trends and fashion. Think of this as an iTunes celebrity playlist, if you will.

It’s an interesting look into some sites I’d never visited before. But after you view a few, you realize…

Hey, big names like Arianna or Paul Krugman, or… Mark Bittman have the same access I do to some of the same websites.

Yeah, trendsetters are using some of the same sources (and tools) for their line of work that we may decide to use (for work or pleasure). And for the tech folks, you don’t need to even be that accomplished to make it big.

Back in the late 1990s, I followed a lot of web designers through their blogs… I emulated them as a blogger myself. We all watched Blogger start up. Some of them knew Evan Williams and the Blogger employees; I was just a lurker. Almost everyday I go to read Jason Kottke’s blog. He’s about the same age as I, and he’s interested in a variety of things. He’s questioned more than once whether he’ll keep blogging… but it’s become a part of who he is. I’ve never met him, and although I’ve left comments on his blog, I’ve never e-mailed him. Yet, I’ve been reading him now for over 10 years. I feel I know the guy–and this is my point–he feels like a regular guy. But he’s read by thousands of folks every week. He obviously does the part well; I’d say the appeal isn’t so much his writing as his diverse choice of interesting topics to link to, ponder over, or argue with.

It’d be fun if Google would entertain a Power Readers for educators. Not just the vocal edubloggers, but what does Arne Duncan read? What’s in your superintendent’s aggregator (does he or she have one?)? What’s in Reader box of the CEO of one of your biggest educational technology vendors?

Do the sites folks read or follow influence your opinion of the personalities? Why?