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Diary of a Raging Anti-Slideite
September 21, 2007
PowerPoint is ubiquitous in today's workplace, but is it useful? One ex-PowerPoint aficionado emphatically says, "No!"
By Dan Carlsruh
Just being in the same room where a PowerPoint presentation is being shown causes me to sweat with nausea, knowing that another person is shining headlights in my eyes to hide the fact he/she doesn't have meaningful content. I start to twitch with every "creative" slide transition, or animated GIF. If the presentation includes sound, my mind revolts and switches off. It's safer to unplug the data feed than risk permanent damage.
Not only am I an Anti-Slideite, I'm the worst kind: a reformed Slider. I come from the dark world of creative backgrounds, customized animations, and slick paragraph displays.
And I was good at it.
No, I was fantastic! I knew every trick and tip PowerPoint had. But I couldn't leave well enough alone. Like a grease monkey deep in a 1949 Ford flat-head rebuild, I opened the PowerPoint hood, tweaked, juiced, and otherwise modified the simple little presentation program until it raced with speed, color, fonts, and video.
I was the power in PowerPoint. I read manuals on proper presentation skills. I purchased third-party backgrounds and animations. I immersed myself in the cult of visual brain candy.
Microsoft should have paid me for using its tools.
I was a PowerPoint God. With great hubris, I sat in my cubicle as mere mortals laid their pathetic presentations at my feet as offerings, begging to use my prowess to magically transform their trite slides into slides of magnificence. I would hear their oblations, and condescend to help them.
Whenever I attended a seminar or meeting where PowerPoint was being used, I would lean back in my chair and sneer at such amateurish attempts. I snickered at beginner mistakes such as using more than two colors or fonts on a slide. And then there was that most despicable of all beginners' faults: sound. I'd shake my head at their weaknesses, and grieve for their sins.
An employer sent me to one of those pay-to-learn shops to get "advanced" PowerPoint instruction. Not only was the money poorly spent, but I was angered a whelp of an instructor would dare try to teach me, the Great Oracle of PowerPoint, how to use advanced techniques I learned more than three years prior.
Content? Who needs content? The medium was the message. Content could be drawn out later through e-mail and phone calls. My presentations were to be awed over, not understood. I expected attendees to sit in profound silence as my presentation hypnotized them into buy-in.
Then things started to change, slowly at first. Small chinks in my PowerPoint altar appeared. Meetings became media events. As I left, I wondered why I didn't know anything more than when I went into the meeting.
Fellow workers were spending more time making their presentations look slick, pushing content aside for colors, pictures, and animations.
Who needs content? I finally realized I do.
Then I watched the PowerPoint virus leave the boardrooms and seminar halls of business, and infect training departments. In an effort to jump on the "online" bandwagon, training managers began using PowerPoint slides in quantities that would make even the most ardent Microsoft apologist blush. Throw a few hundred slides in a classroom and say you have e-learning.
Did employees learn? Who cares! They loved it. Then, the "over-the-ledge" moment happened. In a new job, I was forced to sit through a four-day training class taught entirely in PowerPoint. We sat in a drooling stupor as slide after slide was shown to teach us how to use a sophisticated piece of software.
Sitting in stunned silence on the third day of training, and seeing we had only seen slide 24 out of 139, I had an epiphany. My PowerPoint altar collapsed into a heap of rocks at my feet.
In that moment, I turned from Uber-PowerPoint user to Raging Anti-Slideite. I finally realized we had been duped. Our meetings are ineffective, our seminars teach less, and our training effectiveness is getting trod under the foot of Flash.
The infection is spreading throughout our public schools, where young, impressionable minds are being taught how to apply cute little animated GIFs to PowerPoint presentations, use random transitions, have lines of text fly in from all different parts of the slide, and even use Word Art!
All popular computer-based training (CBT) software now has a PowerPoint plug-in that allows you to drop those ineffectual slides into their program. Voila! Instant CBT. At least that's what the PowerPoint developers want you to think.
Saying that PowerPoint is CBT is like me saying I'm Hemingway because I have a keyboard on my desk.
What happened to just talking in a meeting, or drawing on the whiteboard during training? When did we go from knowledge transfer to needing to look cool?
We need to retrench in business. Turn off the projectors. Throw the laser pointers in the drawers, never to be retrieved again. We need to get back to whiteboards, stick figures, bad handwriting, and scribbles.
We need to get back to talking to each other across the table instead of staring up at a screen.
Luckily, my new boss also is an Anti-Slideite—perhaps not a raging one, but wary of PowerPoint, nonetheless. And he should be. His current four-day training package includes a total of 1,118 slides (not kidding). True, some of the modules are used for a particular group, but it's safe to say the average class still will use close to 1,000 slides during the four days.
We decided to throw out all the bath water, and let the baby go with it. The entire training course is being revamped, training gaps and tasks re-evaluated, objectives rewritten. We are using the "empty garage" method, putting the things we want into the "training garage." This is easier than using the "full garage" method, where we pull out the things we don't want.
Accepted instructional design ideals are being used. We spend time with our subject matter experts describing training gaps and objective writing. We ensure test questions really have something to do with the actual course.
From this effort, we expect to create training workbooks, instructor notes, meaningful exercises, and true CBT that helps our blended learning.
The question eventually rises: "Can't we just create a 'welcome' presentation for the first day?" A bead of sweat forms on my forehead, and my stomach tightens. I look up at my boss, who smiles at me. "Maybe," he says. I race for the bathroom.
Dan Carlsruh has been in the training field for more than 15 years. He currently works in a high-tech military software shop.
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