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?

the cognitive style of powerpoint

i think this article is very entertaining because ever since middle school as a student i have had powerpoint shoved down my throat as a great tool to produce and organized presentation, and i agree with a lot of the points that Tufte presents. however, when Tufte was speaking about the bottom 10% needing powerpoint and the upper 10% not needing i feel that middle school students would definitely fall within the bottom 10% and therefore isn't powerpoint a good tool to introduce to students at a young age to help them organize there main points of a presentation?

i also think that powerpoint can be very useful in some presentations like our admittance portfolio's for instance,but they are very inappropriately used when used by NASA so where is the line between PP helping and hurting a presentation, being a useful tool or a harmful tool to us?

the cognitive style of powerpoint

my first question is quite straight-forward, but throughout the entire reading i couldn't seem to get a grasp on how and when powerpoint found it's way into places like NASA. being everything Tufte describes it as, the least it could get away with was being acceptable as a learning tool where we first learned it, middle school. bullet by bullet introducing points meant to scribble down and recognize on a test. so how in the world did this flimsy program take the place of a written technical report? what information will we lack in the future if practices in poor powerpoint presenting continue?
after reading this, which i suppose is the point, i had no idea what we were doing with a program like powerpoint. why does it exist and why is it passed of as something we can slap together to attempt at proving earth shattering points. the name is deceptive. there are points that should have power, statistics, yet as Tufte states, "powerpoint promotes the hierarchical bullet list..."(Tufte,16) if we know that powerpoint chops our important information into oblivion and doesn't get across exactly what we mean to, then where is the misunderstanding? we are doing a disservice to ourselves, being content with representing ourselves in bulleted lists.