Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

The author obviously has a very strong point - Power Point sucks. That said, he continues to barrage us with the point over and over and seems to blame the program itself for being poor. Obviously it is a mistake to use a program for a function which it is not fit - the Columbia example proved this beyond doubt. However if there is a fault with the system, the system is faulty, and if we continue to use a faulty system, then we are faulty. I don't think the finger was pointed strongly enough at the user - "YOU there, stop USING this crap" as opposed to "Don't you see how PowerPoint is going to ruin our lives if we don't kill it soon?"

cognitive style of powerpoint

I agree with what the author is saying is saying because I feel that powerpoints are too uninteractive and are sometimes hard to pay attention and retain information from. The author states "It is helpful to provide audience members with at least one mode of information that allows them to control the order and pace of learning unlike slides and unlike talk. The author suggests paper handouts, and I think that powerpoints would be best supplemented with a handout of each slide in case the viewer is unable to keep up with the presentation or if the viewer wanted to return to an earlier slide.

The cognitive style of power point

I don’t entirely agree with Tufte about pp being a useless program. PP could be helpful to some people. Some people needs pp to better understand a speech. Some people need the cheesy graphics to understand visual data. Tufte just totally hates pp in his essay and is a bit harsh saying that it’s a stupid way to present data. But I do believe in order a pp presentation to be successful. It needs an effective speaker and outstanding content. Tufte even automatically assumes that pp users use lousy content. Yea maybe they are limited in words but it they choose the right words it works.

1. Tufte mentions that pp is not necessary and presenters should just hand out a print out paper? How does he know that that particular presentation does not need the pp.? how does he know that the audiences would understand the speech better with out the pp? why not use both pp, print outs and a speech to get our point across.
2. Why would pp make a speech ‘boring’? Wouldn’t it be the speakers’ fault for not keeping his audience interested in what he has to say?
3. PP charts are effective according to a certain type of data. Isn’t tufte generalizing that all pp charts is a clear sign of stupidity?

The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

I agree whole-heartedly with Tufte that powerpoint presentations can be a waste of time and a poor way for people to present information. Though is it our own fault for leaning too heavily on the pre-made templates and reading off the slides themselves that create such awful presentations? Or rather if we used the program merly as a tool for strengthening our speech and use it along with other forms of teaching would it still hurt the information?

Response to The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

I have to agree with most of you guys that I have hated Powerpoint for years. I agreed with Tufte on pretty much everything. While the material did tend to become dense and repetive, it was actually far more enjoyable than I thought it would be. Parts of it, in fact, were actually kind of funny. I do think that Powerpoint is a pretty awful program that creates boring nd predictable presentations which are pretty useless. I have been wondering, thought, is it the inablility to make good comparisions that primarily makes Powerpoint statistics so skewed? Also, should we just completely do away with this program altogether? Or can it be salvaged?

cognitive style of powerpoint

I should have known by just the image on the cover what I was getting into. Tufte is very sarcastic, if not sardonic at some times, to emphasize his point that PowerPoint is not promising. He does get repetitive, but it doesn't bother me as much because I think he was just trying to support his point with a lot of information and examples.
I also liked Tufte's connection of Orwell's quote with PowerPoint. The English language accepts just about any new word, similarly to PowerPoint it gets lazy. Other countries like France control their language from turning into something like English in order to preserve language and comprehension. This can be compared to PowerPoint and using other applications.