PowerPoint Corrupts Minds

There’s nothing quite so fun as seeing other people on a rant against PowerPoint. Julia Keller gives a blow-by-blow account of how PowerPoint can destroy your thinking and put creativity into boxes.

But PowerPoint has a dark side. It squeezes ideas into a preconceived format, organizing and condensing not only your material but - inevitably, it seems - your way of thinking about and looking at that material. A complicated, nuanced issue invariably is reduced to headings and bullets. And if that doesn’t stultify your thinking about the subject, it may have that effect on your audience - which is at the mercy of your presentation.

Luckily I was in college before the ubiquitous rise of Powerpoint and laptops. I graduated in 1994 and don’t remember any of my lectures being delivered with PowerPoint.

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Todd Suomela
Associate Director for Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship Department

My interests include digital scholarship, citizen science, leadership, and communications.