PowerPoint, habits of mind, and classroom culture

Abstract

In lecture halls, in secondary school classrooms, during training workshops, and at research conferences, PowerPoint is becoming a preferred method of communicating, presenting, and sharing knowledge. Questions have been raised about the implications of the use of this new medium for knowledge dissemination. It is suggested PowerPoint supports a cognitive and pedagogical style inconsistent with both the development of higher analytical thinking skills and the acquisition of rich narrative and interpretive understanding. This paper examines how PowerPoint invites and seduces educators to reshape knowledge in particular ways, and subsequently how this knowledge is presented to students in the classroom. The particular forms of knowing, relating, and presenting with PowerPoint are decided in part by teacher habituation to the software tool’s default patterns, but also by the very nature of the presentation medium itself.

Keywords:

• computer uses in education
• lecture method
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• multimedia materials
• phenomenology
• visual aids

Acknowledgements

I thank Max van Manen for his suggestion I study PowerPoint phenomenologically, and George Buck, Ellen Rose, and David G. Smith for thoughtful conversations and correspondence about the pedagogical significance of PowerPoint in the classroom.

Notes

1. PowerPoint is a computer software presentation tool distributed by Microsoft Corporation and comes packaged with the Microsoft Office Suite. It was first released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. Within the year, PowerPoint was purchased by Microsoft Corporation, and by 1988 Windows and DOS versions were made available. The tool allows users to develop and deliver presentations as a series of slides in the form of a projected ‘slide‐show’. The software includes a text and graphics editor. Digitized images, sounds, and video may be imported and subsequently displayed on a slide. Other software presentation tools are available (e.g. Apple Keynote, OpenOffice Impress), but it is estimated that PowerPoint is now employed in the creation of 96% of such software generated presentations (Cyphert 2004).

2. Winston Churchill made this statement on 28 October 1943 to the House of Commons, at a meeting in the House of Lords, in a bid to have the old Chamber, bombed on 10 May 1941, ‘restored in all essentials to its old form, convenience and dignity’ (The Churchill Centre 2005).

3. This and other student anecdotes appearing in this paper come from a related phenomenological research project investigating the lived experience of PowerPoint presentations for male and female undergraduate college students. The study, conducted in 2004, included interviewing 14 male and female subjects, aged 22–45. These participants were asked to recall personal experiences of PowerPoint as college or university students.

4. ‘Killer app’ is short for killer application. A killer app is a computer programme or application that surpasses and ultimately ‘kills’ its competitors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Adams

Catherine Adams, a faculty member in the Department of Computing Science, Faculty of Science, Grant MacEwan College, City Centre Campus, 10700‐104 Avenue, Edmonton, AB, Canada T5J 4S2; e‐mail: [email protected], teaches technology tools for teachers and introductory programming for engineers. Her research interests include using hermeneutic phenomenological methodology to examine the pedagogical significance of computer‐technology tools in the classroom.