I’m wondering how many other researchers have encountered Edward Tufte? This man is referred to as the “Da Vinci of Dataâ€.. his ideas on data representation are amazing. He offers this in relation to PowerPoint:
In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?
For more about PowerPoint, here’s a sample from the essay: PowerPoint Does Rocket Science.
You can see the rest of his work at his website – http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ I suspect there’s an incredible amount for us to learn from this man as we move more and more towards online education..