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Oxymorons of our time: "interesting Powerpoint presentation". But why is that?

A few months ago, a friend spotted this small witticism, and reacted angrily: "Blame the workman, not the tools, he said. Frankly, (I told him) I disagree. Powerpoint inherently ruins a presentation in 95% of cases.

It seems that academic research has shown that my analysis is right: "If you have ever wondered why your eyes start glazing over as you read those dot points on the screen, as the same words are being spoken, take heart in knowing there is a scientific explanation - it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at you in the written and spoken form at the same time."

Those are the considered opinions of Professor John Sweller of the University of New South Wales.

Just so that I can show I'm not just parroting Sweller's report, here's my own dissertation, which I posted in a CIX conference back in the last days of 2005: "The problem is that there are a few situations - of the 'blackboard notes' lecture type -  where Powerpoint is actually useful - where you want to have your audience stop and write down what you're saying," I wrote back then.

But the rest of the time, having visuals is not a help: "It's not rocket science," I wrote back then. "If you want your audience's attention, don't distract them."

Blackboard note-giving, I suspect, is more useful than most speakers allow for. If they did that, they'd find Powerpoint useful. But of course, they don't; they fall between two stools.

What they actually do, is to put up a slide which, if I had time to write it down, and study, would be useful information. But then, because they are doing a presentation, they feel they have to be entertaining, and they talk across it; which means you can't focus either on the screen and what is written, or on the speaker and what is said.

I have a very simple rule: "If you want to illustrate your talk with the occasional amusing cartoon, do... but don't make the mistake of doing that at the same time as you try to make a technical or sales point."

Well a year on, and the Professor seems to have proved my point, powerfully. But he also goes further, and says that we should not read the notes aloud off the blackboard: "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster," Professor Sweller said. "It should be ditched. It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

Of course, if you aren't a confident public speaker, then notes can help. And Powerpoint may work in that sense. I would actually recommend doing a PP in preparation for a lot of public presentations - and then using it purely as an aide memoire for the speaker, and not allowing the audience to see it.

But a good presenter, who could get and hold an audience's attention, will find it much harder to get and hold the same level of attention if there's a distracting set of visuals on the wall.

I think it's adding to the challenge, if you expect to make a PP-based presentation which is as good as one which involves you making eye contact with your audience. I think this isn't a question of 'bad workman' - I think it's inherent in a situation where you're forcing the audience to decide: "Do we watch the speaker? or watch the screen?"

When I was at school, we still had blackboards. Some of our teachers came in, talked to us, and then expected us to remember what they'd said; we didn't. Others came in, without a word to us, and wrote stuff on the blackboard for 40 minutes, at the end of which we were in possession of our own hand-written copy of their notes, which, perhaps, one or two of us understood.

The good teachers did both, but never together. They would explain something, and involve the class in question and answer discussion; then they'd illustrate it with short blackboard notes. Then when everybody had copied the note, they'd discuss the next step. Then make more notes.

Frankly, it's possible, I suppose, that a similar approach would work for seminars. But I find myself sucking my teeth and doubting it. I'd want to see it done, before I accepted that it can be!

My fundamental assumption is that most good presentations differ from bad presentations in one important aspect: interactivity. If you engage the audience, get them to respond in some way, you'll hold their attention, and you'll get good feed-back which will guide you in how the presentation goes.

I don't know how you'd set up a PP show that would allow that flexibility; in other words, I think PP is a strait-jacket which enforces mediocrity even on a good speaker.