Study shows PowerPoint might make information harder to digest
Australian researchers have found that the human brain doesn't do a very good job of processing audio and visual information at the same time. But in pretty much every business meeting or school lecture you've been to in the last few years, you've probably found yourself struggling to listen to a speaker at the same time as bullet points flashed across a PowerPoint presentation.Rather than driving the point home, the PowerPoint slides might be distracting you from what the speaker is saying. It's possible that the speaker is also distracting you from what's on the slides, but given the choice between paying attention to some bullet points or a human being, we're guessing you'll get more out of the lecture.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Yayaja said 3:50PM on 4-05-2007
I agree!! I always hated power points in college. Some classes were taught entirely through power point. You know what would be great? Using power point for strictly visual items, and relying on the speech of the presenter to convey the information. This would give the audience something to focus on and look at and help them visualize the concepts you are trying to portray.
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fgdgdfgdfg said 4:38PM on 4-05-2007
Chalkboard lectures are best anyway. They are even better, when supported by a nice handout (or similar).
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keeves said 5:03PM on 4-05-2007
I much prefer watching lectures on overhead projectors / blackboards, with handouts so you don't have to try and jot anything down.
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james 42 said 9:26PM on 4-05-2007
I pee, you pee, we all pee on PP.
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Lebeu said 9:02AM on 4-06-2007
So, a small instruction and everything solved?
The instruction:
Pause your talk and give ppl some time to go through the slide.
Lebeu
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Phil said 6:05PM on 4-06-2007
The first comment by Yayaja is spot on.
Those of us in the communications industry have known this for years. We did not need a study.
The whole point of visual support to a talk or lecture is to add to, clarify, emphasise or visualise information, not to repeat the words.
It also offers a way to communicate the same message to those who learn by different modalities.
Worse of all is the practice of speakers using the PowerPOint to read from, or remind them what they have to say.
Sadly, "Death by PowerPoint" is now a standard occurrence at meetings. It is a crime committed by executives who are interested in appearance rather than action
After all, why would you give any presentation other than to create change - in ideas, in perception or in knowledge - or in some other area.
In my experience, this "read of the slide" use of PowerPoint is usually used to maintain the status quo or impress the boss, rather than achieve any useful outcome.
Phil Bassett
The Production Team Ltd.
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Sasha said 10:37PM on 4-13-2007
Presenations need to be more "visual". A picture is worth a thousand words.
The problem with presentations - too much TEXT (like bullet lists), and not much visual diagrams (relations).
The diagrams can add value to the voice, if a speaker did a homework. Text slides are easier to make, but text slides are redundant to what speaker is saying anyway. The audience reads the text faster than speaker can talk.
Bad presentation: Bullet Lists
Good presentation: Relational Diagrams, Headlines, Charts and Tables.
And one more thing - presentations should be easy to publish to the Web (like spresent.com)
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