I'm going off at a tangent from "decline in education, comment on active
learning" to respond to Kevin's remarks about PowerPoint (PP). I would
generalise to say that "detail laden Powerpoint slides" are usually a bad
idea in any context. I've just come from two workshops with many PP
presentations and the ones with lots of detailed information are almost
impossible to assimilate. Putting data matrices on a slide is really a
crime.
Although I use PP extensively (many of my presentations, mostly for short
courses on ecological modelling and such, are on ciencia.silvert.org and
bill.silvert.org), I use it to display and keep on the screen the topic I am
discussing, but the material I present orally is an expansion on these
topics, reading the slide out loud is pointless. If I have to put data or
equations on the screen I show very little and discuss it in detail. PP is
good for outlining, but not for text or data.
Having said this, I would like to contradict myself with an anecdote from
many years back, when I attended a seminar about an environmental impact
study. The EIS involved a mild perturbation of the environmental conditions
in a small area of the ocean, and the speaker presented a huge matrix
showing how species would be affected. He quickly went on to the next slide
and was astonished when I said that I had a question and would he please
return to the impact matrix. He was even more astonished when I asked him
about one of the values, which I had noticed was a very strange number
(something like -80%), but it was pure luck that this one number struck my
eye. He mumbled some explanation about the fish being very sensitive, so I
asked why they didn't just swim away instead of dying. He solemnly pointed
out that it is very difficult to include migration in a complex ecosystem
model, so his fish didn't swim. But he was going to apply for another
million dollars to include that in the next generation of the model. So
sometimes having a lot of data on a PP slide can produce results - but not
always what you want!
OK, it's kind of a dumb story, but I got a kick out of it. And seriously,
there are a lot of models out there where fish don't swim. And I also
reviewed a paper with foxes and hares interacting on 100 m square grids in
which a fox could starve to death if there were no hares in his cell, even
if there were plenty in the next cell, 100 m away. Ecological modelling
makes a great spectator sport, and bad PP slides can contribute.
Bill Silvert
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Mueller" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: segunda-feira, 25 de Janeiro de 2010 17:56
Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] decline in education, comment on active learning
However, when the lecture consists of detail laden Powerpoint slides,
active thought by students is discouraged because more of the information
is at hand at any given moment of the lecture and there is less incentive
to anticipate where the lecturer is going or follow his/ her thought
process...
