Wednesday 23rd October 2013 - Powerpoint - for good or ill

Three days gone this week, and I have made three Powerpoint presentations. The Powerpoint has become a ubiquitous tool in many diferent contexts.  I know there are now alternatives, and many people are starting to favour Prezi.  But I haven't yet been at a Prezi presentation that didn't make me feel a little queasy - and on one occasion the whole audience implored the presenter to stop or they would walk out.

What did we do before Powerpoint?  Over the years I have illustrated my lectures by combinations of overhead transparences - some prepared and others written on during the lecture - and 35 mm slides.  My own inaugural lecture as a Professor, back in 1998, was given  with the help of around 25 slides - and an operator sitting in the projection room at the back of Lecture Theatre 4 in the Arts Tower to operate them.  Slides, naturally, required a great deal of preparation, with the submission of material to the photographic technician some days, sometimes some weeks, before the start of a course.  Overhead transparencies were easier to deal with, particularly after the introduction of transparencies that could be put through a photocopier so that existing paper-based material could be copied to them.  (Unfortunately in my department one particular colleague - now retired - never grasped the importance of distinguishing between the heavy-duty transparencies that could be used in the copier and the lighter-weight ones that could not - with resultant melting episodes that also assailed the nostrils and closed the photocopier down for some days.)

Some people talk about 'death by Powerpoint' and it is true that an unending series of slides heavy with text can get very tedious - even more so if the presenter actually then reads the text from the screen.  But overhead transparencies could also be used to overkill effect.  One distinguished colleague (not from this University, but who went on to become VC at two institutions successively) used to arrive to deliver conference papers armed with boxfulls of pre-prepared transparencies including one that he used on a number of occasions in each talk, simply containing the word 'BUT' in large capital letters.  Everything he said was read straight from his transparencies.

So what have my three presentations been this week so far?
1. A presentation to University Council about the year on year change in student numbers in the University, the need to pay close attention to our competitiveness in the current environment, and plans for revising our institutional apporach to what our students get.
2. A lecture to students on the Business, Law and Social Science track at Sheffield International College on the breadth of social sciences, the ened for inter-disciplinarity, and illustrations from one of my own research interests - international migration.
3. A presentation of the University's learning and teaching strategies to a group of newly appointed lecturers from across the University.

On each occasion Powerpoint enabled me to use a combination of photographic images, graphs, tables of data, and words - with varying degrees of emphasis on different elements.  And unlike the 'old days' I didn't have to prepare everything weeks in advance.  The material could be up to the minute - indeed in the case of the Council presentation I was able to update the data that had been ciruclated the week before in the printed version of the papers.

I am not claiming that I am a particularly skilled user of Powerpoint.  But I am an enthusiast for it.  I'm not sure what I for one would do without it.