Not in mine. I am one of the only professors or preachers in the Western world today who has never done a PowerPoint presentation and who, in fact, doesn’t even know how to do one. I’ve got the software and never so much as even opened it. So, here are my curmudgeonly contentions:
OK, first a question: What do you students, teachers, parishioners think about all this PowerPointing all over the place?
Now my curmudeongly carpings:
First, it minimizes the word and the ability to speak with words.
Second, about 50% of the time something goes wrong: the computer doesn’t work, the connection doesn’t work, the screen doesn’t come down. My son took a class with a professor who was big on PowerPoint and he said that more often than not the class sat there and twiddled its fingers while the professor fiddled his fingers on switches trying to get the presentation working.
Third, it’s an all-consuming passion for some to the effect that without PowerPoint they can’t teach. You can tell this when the stuff doesn’t work: they don’t know what to do with themselves.
Fourth, most of the time it is just outlines on the screen; hand them out or speak your way through them. It permits more eye contact.
Fifth, it takes so much time to produce a presentation that its yield is less than its effort. How do I know this? I hear profs and preachers talk about how much time is involved.
Sixth — this is probably the bottom-line for me (that’s a pun) — it seems to me to be the transfer of the business model to the classroom, and teaching the arts and humanities is not business. Business dazzles. Human communication is not dazzling: it’s eye ball to eye ball talking.
Seventh — do I see good uses of it? Yes. When you need pictures or images or a text that is much easier to toss on a screen … that sort of thing, a PowerPoint seems a good idea. Which means I might need to abandon some of my goofy looking chalk drawings and start using some PowerPoint presentations.