Anti-Death by PowerPoint Presentation
In the last few years, I have heard various people express their distain of presentations that use Microsoft PowerPoint as a presentation tool. When I first heard of the term ‘Death by PowerPoint’, I was quite surprised; as I actually enjoyed the process of developing PowerPoint slides for my presentations. However, during the course of my university studies, I started to realise how boring PowerPoint presentations can be.
Don’t get me wrong, I still like PowerPoint…just not how it is being used by a lot of people.
In my organisation they have PowerPoint slides that are just made up of text; published on the Intranet site in order to present to staff, new initiatives undertaken by management. Even though this saves a lot of time, employees are left uninterested in the strategic directions of the organisation.
The eLearning courses that are offered in my organisation are also basic PowerPoint page turning programs, with multiple choice quizzes that are incredibly boring. This affects your attention span and leads you into a semi-conscious state at your computer. When you have completed an eLearning course, you are left feeling as though you have wasted hours of your time without learning anything.
Webinar software may provide a more exciting avenue for conducting eLearning programs, but that is heavily dependant upon the quality of the presentation, the presenter and how much freedom participants have in contributing. If all three of these factors are poor in the presentation, participants will be left bored and will not pay attention to the presentation.
Anyway, I just recently watched this great Slide presentation about this topic by Garr Reynolds. i hope you will enjoy it.
