6/21/2007

PowerPoint: Beating a dead horse?


In line with May’s Learning Circuits’ big question around PowerPoint I found some more interesting reading on the topic of PowerPoint, its uses/abuses, presentation styles and more>>:

Don’t Hate PowerPoint; Hate the PowerPointers
Really Bad PowerPoint, Part II

I still stand by my initial argument that PowerPoint has a place in business, specifically as a tool for communicating information during a business meeting/presentation. I don't see it as an eLearning tool, although there are exceptions where an extremely creative person has used PowerPoint and created a great eLearning course. Having said that, the exceptions proof the rule. As far as bad PowerPoint presentation go, I re-assert that you can blame the tool, rather blame the presenters. A tool is only as good or bad as the person using it.

Do you have any good examples of PowerPoint presentations? I am a huge fan or visual presentations that don't rely on bullet points. A massive amount of bullets tend to lead to a reductionist presentation and generally the presenter will use the bullet points as cue points which loses the interaction level with the audience. Your thoughts? Is this discussion over and should I lay it to rest?

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I'd like to point out that our product Speech-Over has made PowerPoint into a better e-learning tool. You use it in PPT design mode to add voices that are synchronized with PowerPoint animations to create very effective audio-visual lessons and courses.

The voice-empowered presentations convert to Flash for e-learning with standard conversion tools.

Site: www.speechover.com

Joel Harband
Tuval Software Industries

Quintus Joubert said...

Hi Joel,

Thanks for the link. I had a look at one fo the demos:
http://www.speechover.com/web-demo/synch-demo1.html
and it is pretty interesting. Honestly, I think the TTS voices still need some work to sound natural.

Unknown said...

Hi Quintus,

I agree with you about the TTS voices. I think the answer is what Bill Gates once said about speech technology in general: it is constantly developing but even in its less than perfect form it already has applications - for example in telephone answering systems.

Here too, the voices are less than perfect, but even so they already have applications - for example in in-house training where you have a "captive audience" and the main thing is a clear explanation.

Companies make the tradeoff between a little less voice quality vs. a big savings in time and money and in some applications it makes sense.

Joel

Unknown said...

Hi Quintus,

I agree with you about the TTS voices. I think the answer is what Bill Gates once said about speech technology in general: it is constantly developing but even in its less than perfect form it already has applications - for example in telephone answering systems.

Here too, the voices are less than perfect, but even so they already have applications - for example in in-house training where you have a "captive audience" and the main thing is a clear explanation.

Companies make the tradeoff between a little less voice quality vs. a big savings in time and money and in some applications it makes sense.

Joel

Norma said...

Using PowerPoint - choose iSpring Pro to make your presentation flash. It's reduce the size and make it easy to share.