Just look at all the boxes you can fill with stuff!
Maybe it's just me, but as I read Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," I couldn't help but feel that it was directed at me, especially between the ages of eleven and fifteen.  This feeling of guilt grew even more as I watched Davits' pecha-kucha on pecha-kuchas, and remember growing up with PowerPoint.  I clearly recall being astounded at all of the tricks it could do, only to become disillusioned with each of them, one by one.  Tufte's disapproval of the "abuse" PowerPoint performs on content is legitimate, and I stand guilty as charged.

I have to admit that I did love PowerPoint at first.  When they added the letter-by-letter animations,  I was still in middle school, and I couldn't wait to use them. I thought they looked really cool until I watched my slideshow just once and couldn't even sit through it myself.  Animations, once the most exciting thing on the screen, were just distractions that lost the audience's favor (and quickly).
  
Is it 1? Or just under 1?  Maybe 0.98 New Nations?
An even harder lesson to learn was appropriate information density, or managing clutter, a lesson PowerPoint certainly does not seem to be aware of (see image at top right).  Tufte's advice on data-to-ink ratios would have been invaluable in this area, as would the six lines per slide, six words per line guideline.  However, I'm not sure that Tufte is age-appropriate for most students that are being introduced to PowerPoint.  For such a group, I feel that the now-global pecha-kucha presentations would be more suitable to show them the ropes, as far as effective information presentation is concerned.


The real trouble with class PowerPoint presentations came later, as we got to high school.  Our projects became more and more complex, so more people would stand there and read long blocks of text directly off of the screen.  Tufte's book does not address this issue quite as well as the rigid format of pecha-kucha presentations does.  I can remember many past projects with a time or slide limit (nobody had considered both), which often drove students crazy, either trying to cram their slides with information or rehearsing their slides over and over to nail a time limit.  The turmoils of middle and high school presentations may be averted with pecha-kuchas, but Tufte's core idea of being true to your content must come into play at some point in the education process.
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