I'm definitely old enough to remember when PowerPoint, and even
Kodachrome, were not used in lectures. That didn't mean we didn't have
images. A wise colleague, when PP was just becoming into vogue, said
"It's just an expensive overhead projector." Of course, some reading
this may have never experienced an overhead projector based lecture,
either.
I would not say that PP is not a useful lecturing tool. I believe the
folks who first raised the idea of it being less useful than other
lecture modes were complaining of the approach where the presentation
includes a great deal of information that must be captured, leaving
little opportunity for the student to be engaged in the lecturer's
intellectual process (if any) as it progresses through the lecture. I
was even a little surprised to hear a modern student suggest that other
lecture tools were more effective, but also agreed with the idea that
the lecture may not be the best place to present a great deal of
detailed content for capture. It may, however, be a good place to help
the student engage with the content, and content must be available for
that to happen.
I remember my math professors writing an immense quantity of material on
the board as they lectured, but the good ones were engaged in the
development of the equations and their solutions as they worked. They
didn't just put the stuff up there for us to capture. I agree with you
concerning proper use of PP, in other words.
And besides, each of us has to find the tools that work best for us and
our students. A professor who uses PP poorly would be likely to use an
overhead poorly, too. I have often said to students when I did present
a busy graph or diagram that the point was not for them to capture all
the information it contained (and have sometimes cautioned them against
trying to write down everything or record it), but for it to serve as a
platform for our discussion (or my presentation). I would tell them
that the same or a similar illustration was available in their
textbooks, but that the discussion we went through concerning it was
not.
For better or worse, I never made my lecture materials available to
students on library reserve or otherwise. Today, I don't know whether
that was good or bad, but at the time I thought it was best. I also did
not encourage the use of recorders in class. I remember a cartoon from
_The Chronicle of Higher Education_ with a recorder playing from a
lectern while all the student desks were occupied by recorders busily
recording. A colleague once told me that he sometimes felt as if he
were just a recorder spewing information, and that his students were
just recorders copying it.
Sorry, this has been too long. David McNeely
On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 6:27 AM, {George Kraemer} wrote:
I haven't been following this thread closely, so apologies if I've
missed a similar post.
I disagree, at least in part. Powerpoint lectures do not
_necessarily_ disallow an active learning environment. It all depends
on the presentation, no pun intended. I've found that PP frees me from
writing on the board. I can move as I talk, something that helps me
frame the direction of the lecture. I can better gauge comprehension
and engagement if I am watching the class, much more so that if my
back is to the students half the time while I write on a board.
And, if the slides are only outlines that the instructor fleshes out
with details and examples, I can be sure students will attend class.
Mine know that's a strategy for failure. The outlined material
enables the kind of "discuss with your partner this: if A and B, what
does that imply about C?"
Let's not even talk about the value of images. Isn't anyone out there
old enough to remember lectures for which text on a board was the
rule?
