I'm not sure why the piece is circulating now? But FB, of course, is known (notorious?) for such things--the resurrection of ideas and memes and lies and interesting stories and inconvenient truths ... it's quite a mix, as you Facebookies well know. (Would Chewbacca be a Facebookie Wookie?)
Anyway, here's a link to the entire piece.
Written by a professor, Dr. Paul Ralph (Aukland Univ.), the piece summarizes some research, some interviews, and makes such declarations as this: "Slides discourage complex thinking."
Okay. I have attended some PowerPoint lectures which were, indeed, dull--the speaker merely reproducing on the slides what he/she was saying aloud. Lots of words--few graphics, etc.
I'll also confess this: During the later years of my teaching career (I retired in the spring of 2011), I used PowerPoint quite a bit in my high school classes--American literature. But I like to think (self-delusion?) that I was animating the class, not narcotizing it.
I didn't use it every day; I didn't simply make slides of the words I'd planned to say--hell, I was lucky to know what I was going to say milliseconds before the sentences tumbled from my mouth!
Instead, I used it principally during my introductions to the classes, introductions to the writers we were going to be reading. So--say--when we were about to read some Hemingway, I would show pictures and talk about Hemingway-related places where my wife and I had gone--from his boyhood home in Oak Park, IL, to his final home and grave in Ketchum, ID.
For Willa Cather, we drove all over the countryside near Red Cloud, NE (the cornfields were awesome!), saw the place where she was born (near Gore, VA), visited her later-life summer place on Grand Manan Island (New Brunswick), saw her simple gravesite in Jaffrey, NH.
We toured Arrowhead (the home in Pittsfield, MA, where Melville wrote Moby-Dick), climbed Monument Mountain (where he met Hawthorne, in company with Oliver Wendell Holmes), took a boat to Nantucket, visited whaling museums, saw his grave in the Bronx.
Jack London took me twice to the Klondike (including a hike over the Chilkoot Pass, prominent in The Call of the Wild) and many times to his former ranch near Glen Ellen, CA.
And on and on and on and on. All these places we photographed, then made PP slides to show my classes.
My purpose is all this was to humanize the writers--to show my students where and how they lived--to show them how history has honored them (or not)--to let the kids see the settings they were going to be reading about in a story or poem or play or novel.
Did I succeed? You'd have to ask my former students. I'm sure that what I was doing did not interest some of them (so it goes--no matter what you do), but I like to think (deluding myself?) that the PowerPoints did, indeed, enrich their experiences with American literature. It certainly enriched mine!
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