Sphinx

If you haven’t already seen it, head over immediately to Rebecca Schuman’s hilarious and perceptive piece on Slate, PowerPointless, subtitled “Digital slideshows are the scourge of higher education”. Then, if you are a teacher, spend five minutes contemplating those things you have done with PowerPoint that you ought not to have done, for there is no health in you. There are people working on a suitable scale of penances; using the ‘spin’ animation is obviously a sackable offence. Students and other non-academics can, for the moment, start smugly compiling a PowerPoint Bingo card for the next lecture they have to attend; if you have to do PowerPoints they’re probably rubbish as well, but that’s our fault for setting such a bad example. “Faculty who abuse Powerpoint create students who abuse Powerpoint”.

On the whole, I don’t think my practice comes off too badly in terms of the various sins that Schuman identifies; I do at least keep the animation to a minimum, don’t try to cram too many words in tiny font onto a single slide, and have never ever simply read out the words on the screen. On the contrary, I treat the slideshow rather like a jazz standard in small group improvisation, a basic pre-determined structure of chord changes and key musical phrases on which I can riff, sometimes springing off in completely new directions and then heading back to the original, not least as a means of making sure that I get in all the really important points and still finish more or less on time. The fact that I frequently forget exactly what the next point on the slide will be functions in the same way as the pianist suddenly deciding to chuck in some tritone substitutions; depending on how the spirit moves me, I can either stick in a few passing notes to negotiate the key change and carry on with my original line of thought, or pause to see where this unexpected idea might take us instead – and at the same time, the audience members may be hearing things in what I have to say that I’m not conscious of having put there. (I’m reminded of the Malcolm Bradbury joke about Saussure’s Cours de linguistique generale, reconstructed from lecture notes after his death: “We cannot be entirely sure whether Saussure did actually distinguish between langue and parole, or where the drawing of the rabbit on p.23 actually fits”). So, every time I give the lecture on this topic it’s different, even if I use exactly the same slides, and the slides don’t remotely convey everything important from the lecture.

But, the slides do convey rather a lot – they certainly do not meet Schuman’s demand that “your slideshow by itself should be incomprehensible” – and I do commit the ultimate sin of putting them onto our Virtual Learning Environment for students to peruse at their leisure. In part, this is simply a pragmatic acceptance of the reality that a fair number of students will miss any given class; yes, this would be annoying if I spent any time thinking about it, but at least in the UK (maybe the US is different), we don’t really have the option of saying to such students “tough, you just should have been there”. Making the slides generally available is a lot less work than sending them to individual students after every class, let alone trying to determine which of them have genuine excuses and so should be allowed to catch up on what they’ve missed and which should suffer the full consequences of their absence. Life is too short, and the imperative to provide our students with all the support they need, think they need or simply want is too strong, to do anything else.

I do actually have a stronger and more personal reason, however, that is directly opposed to Schuman’s concern that putting the slides on the web ensures that students don’t have to pay attention in class. On the contrary, the one thing that I truly hate with PowerPoint is the way that, the moment a new slide or new line appears, half the class instantly put their heads down in order to transcribe it, rather than following what I’m actually saying (which may, as noted above, have very little to do with what’s just appeared on the screen). It’s understandable if unfortunate behaviour on their part – but if the slides are available on the web for them, ideally in advance of the class, it’s easy for me to insist that they stop doing this as it’s completely unnecessary. Far better for them to note just the important ideas and questions, rather than trying to get down all the basic information as well; even better if they print the slides off in advance and make additional notes on them. I don’t think this is risking my own obsolescence, as the things that are really important and individual in the lectures don’t wholly appear in the slides; it does offer a marginally improved possibility of making the class operate as I want it to, as a forum for exploring ideas rather than (as many students, understandably but unfortunately, still regard it) as a place where information is conveyed from my brain to their notes.

If I have one complaint about Schuman’s brilliant polemic, it’s the way that it largely ducks issues of causation. The reason why students tend to produce crummy slideshows is obvious – “They learned it from watching us” – but how do we explain the manifest failings of academics in this regard? There’s a hint that we may be seduced by, or dominated by, the technology itself, in a sort of McLuhanite “medium is the message” way (the existence of ‘fly in’ and ‘spin’ animations creates the irresistible temptation to make use of them? Certainly I’m suffering at the moment from the fact that the new version of the programme installed on my work computer doesn’t want to let me do the simple ‘appear’ and ‘fade’ animations that used to be my sole concession to fancy graphics). There’s a broad implication that we may simply be lazy, and insufficiently concerned about the effectiveness of our teaching practices to spend any time thinking about them. More could certainly be said about the pressures from students and institutions to make use of such tools, to provide extensive support to student learning (narrowly defined) and to make sure that everything is comprehensible; it’s not that we necessarily have much of a choice (again, maybe this is more a UK thing). Student demand for comprehensive PowerPoints on demand produces compliant faculty? I don’t think this is entirely untrue…

Obviously, PowerPoint is a tool. In ideal circumstances, it’s one of a whole range of different tools, from which we select after careful thought in order to achieve specific ends. But perhaps for different reasons we have only a limited number of tools to choose from, or we don’t have time to learn how to use them to their full advantage and/or to think through properly what it is we’re trying to achieve, in which case we’re likely to lapse into the default position of looking for nails to hit with our hammer and using PowerPoint to convey lots of information with silly graphics. It’s certainly true that slideshows can be a safety net, allowing us to muddle through on the basis of insufficient preparation and/or inspiration because the ‘meat’ of the lecture already exists in a coherent, usable form regardless of the teacher’s coherence on the day. Maybe it’s time for me to abandon the standards in favour of without-a-net free improvisation: no title, just four slides each with a single word on them. Of course, there may be a good reason why my love of avant-garde jazz isn’t widely shared, and the same may hold true for the lecture theatre…