PowerPoint Never Gets Old

Recently, my post about my SAT Challenge entry has leaped into the Top Five Most Emailed list over on the right, for what reason I can't really say. That gives me two of the top five, though-- eat my dust, Myers. Now there's only that Deltoid character between me and world domination...

The other Most Emailed post is my PowerPoint advice, which reminds me that I'm a terrible person for not linking to Dave Munger's Casual Friday study of PowerPoint technique. In my defense, it was posted at the very busiest point of the term for me, and I forgot about it by the time I managed to dig myself back out from work.

Dave put together a few short movie clips of PowerPoint presentations, designed to test various aspects of the advice I posted. One version presented results graphically, and another put them only in text, and so on. People were asked the view one of the movies, and then answer some questions about the content.

The results weren't exactly a dramatic confirmation of my advice (go over to Cognitive Daily to read them), but it's still cool to see an attempted test.

And, while I'm talking about PowerPoint advice, here's yet another set of advice, this one with step-by-step instructions for how to override some of the stupider default settings. What I'd really like is a way to replace the stupid defaults, so I don't have to go through this nonsense every time I start a new presentation, but Microsoft doesn't believe in that. If the linked post gets even a fraction of speakers to stop blindly accepting the deafult settings, though, that'll be an improvement.

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So I'm a teacher type right? And what do I think of powerpoint? Well, it's certainly convenient, although to be honest, I'm partial to good old real time pen and projector or chalk and blackboard lectures (a good way to pace yourself).
Over at Effect Measure, Revere (or one of the Reveres, anyway, I'm not certain if they're plural or not) has posted another broadside against PowerPoint, calling it "the scourge of modern lecturing." This is
I'm currently at a meeting in Europe and listening to -- really looking at -- scientific papers. I say "looking at" because they all are using PowerPoint, the scourge of modern day lecturing.
Given all the interest in PowerPoint lately, we thought it might be a good time to devote a Casual Friday to PowerPoint.

The standard Microsloth way to override defaults is to make a template file and open that (thereby generating a new empty file with all the defaults of that template). You can set fonts, animations, backgrounds, and the like.

Or you can just change over to Keynote on the Mac ;-)