We talk about bad use iof Powerpoint. We tend not to talk about bad use of non-Powerpoint.

I only have a few lectures that are so organized that I’d actually consider putting the whole thing — in outline at least — in powerpoint form. What I’d really like to have, actually, is a kind of flexible presentation system so that I could quickly search through my collection for a particular chart or painting and display it, without the entire class seeing me scroll through directories of stuff or riffling through google images…. Sure, sometimes I know in advance exactly what I’m going to need, but between the improvisational nature of my brain and the unpredictability of student questions, powerpoint just doesn’t work that well most of the time.

There were varying degrees of resistance. One colleague, a particularly brilliant Swiss woman and a notoriously poor communicator – her view was that communication confused what should be a quite simple matter – refused outright. The manager responded with a direct order and an ultimatum.

And so, come the day, she stood in front of the flip chart and read the bullet points off it. Very. Very. Slowly. Bear in mind that the visiting departments were well acquainted with the topics and were expecting some background, insight, structure, or just general enlightenment. At first she read the flip charts out in a flat monotone but as the presentation continued, she allowed a note of puzzlement to enter what she was saying, until finally her voice rose in squeaks of astonishment at the contents of her own presentation.

The visitors were furious. Further presentations were canceled. But it wasn’t the fault of Powerpoint.

And this wasn’t in academia, but in a competitive, private sector, unsubsidized shipping company.

PowerPoint’s allowed me to use more visual material in my courses. I’m happiest about an entire seminar class on early modern visual culture and gender based on about twenty images pulled together with PowerPoint — nothing but the illustrations, the names of the creator and the dates. The images are a lot more prepossessing up on the screen than reproduced at about 2×3″ in a textbook or reader!

Sure, you don’t have to use it and nobody should be entirely reliant on the technology, but my writing hand is fairly crippled from broken bones and nerve damage. I can keyboard well but I can barely write with chalk on a board so doing it by hand in class doesn’t work for me if there’s a viable alternative. And I much prefer the clarity of PowerPoint slides to my chicken-scrawled map of the Caribbean or attempt to lay out a statistical analysis of convictions in 18th century London on the blackboard!

This year my senior students, following my lead, are doing a better job employing PowerPoint: they put up short passages from primary sources about which they presenting (so their classmates can take turns to read the passage and discuss their interpretations). This is much better than their usual impulse to put up enormous screens of text at about 14pt font!

We’ve talked a bit about how to think about presentations but could do a bit more on this end. I’m hoping that next term will be even better and that they’ll come out of the class not only with a better-developed sense of history, but with some savvy about how they choose to present their knowledge, whatever technology they use.

This does make sense, and I have nothing but anecdote. But my anecdote is at least two professors from my college experience who almost always gave their lectures with Powerpoint, who I thought gave better lectures on those few occasions when something went wrong with the technology and they couldn’t use the slides.

Maybe nothing was different about their presentations without the slides. Maybe the problem with the slides was how I related to them in the audience, and I could have had this better experience every class if I somehow managed to ignore their existence. (Though I doubt it.) But I was amazed at how instead of getting flustered at not being able to use the technology they expected to have at hand, they ended up giving what I thought were their best lectures.