NavList:

Richard Langley, you wrote:
"PowerPoint presentations are a mainstay of the scientific and engineering
academic communities."

Uh-oh. Stockholm Syndrome. The long line of victims of PowerPoint does not make it a better product. It's a product created and designed for business meetings, attuned to the style of mid-level managers and sales staff everywhere. That it has been drafted into the role of default presentation tool for poor academics who know no better is terribly unfortunate. That they come to love it is hardly surprising when they have been held hostage for so long... Do not give up, Richard!! You can yet escape from its spell! :)

And you wrote:
"Some are good and some are bad. We try to train our students to produce good ones."

Good for you! I do approve. Even when confronted with an evil product, you can always hope for good results by working against its insidious, seductive influence.

And you concluded:
"But to classify PowerPoint generally as evil is a gross exaggeration -- along the lines of some of the reporting that Fox News does. ;-)"

Of course, the phrase should not be taken literally. It does not mean that PowerPoint is the spawn of Satan. It does mean that it is "like" the spawn of Satan. But I must emphasize that this is, by no means, my phrase. If you do an Internet search on the phrase "PowerPoint is evil", you will find some of the good points made by Edward Tufte (inventor of the expression) himself and from some who have both mostly agreed and others who have mostly disagreed:
https://www.google.com/#q=%22powerpoint+is+evil%22.
I'm curious, Richard, have you read any of these critiques of PowerPoint before? Are they common knowledge among skilled educators you know personally who are compelled to use PowerPoint?

On the other hand, maybe it's not evil: "PowerPoint doesn't kill presentations -- people do". That's the sort of defense one hears all too often of the very weak style of PowerPoint and its abuse. That's that Stockholm Syndrome again. PowerPoint comes pre-installed with the network licenses for Excel and Word that most major institutions purchase (it's almost always a package deal), so people who would NEVER adopt the product on its own merits end up using it, depending upon it, and, yes, DEFENDING it, because "it is there".

And finally, PowerPoint has actually improved considerably in the past several years. I would temper Tufte's original claim, and say "PowerPoint is mostly evil". Mostly.

-FER

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