Presentations: Projecting a Better Future
November 5, 2020 In the year of the pandemic, having been dispatched to a makeshift office in my attic, in times of contemplation I find myself scanning the piles of junk that have accumulated over two decades of living here. My son, infinitely intrigued with the history of technology, once upon a time made me drive to his high school to retrieve from a dumpster a horrific example of education technology, the overhead projector. And here it is, in all its glory.
The overhead projector, most prominently used in history and science classes, eventually gave way to PowerPoint. But technology doesn’t automatically make a presentation more engaging.
Somewhere between the film strip, a roll of photos run through a primitive projecting apparatus used most often in history and science classes, the slide projector, with its clicking, spinning carousel of analog images, and the modern-day presentation crutch, PowerPoint, the overhead allowed teachers to place transparent pieces of plastic on the base and write over them as they taught, squinting through the impossibly bright bulb of light that projected the instructional information onto a screen.
I started thinking about this as I read an opinion piece from last year about the “death” of PowerPoint, which has been a staple of live presentations since 1987. While I appreciate the convenience of being able to create visuals, I also recognize that it can come at a cost. So many PowerPoint-infused presentations are dull, lifeless, robotic, and not responsive to the audience.
The truth is, it takes a lot of work to be engaging, and the lure of being able to project 15 lines of text on a slide to ensure that nothing is forgotten or given short shrift is definitely not the way to educate or win a crowd. It’s one of those cases where technology that’s supposed to make us better simply makes us more mediocre… myself included.
My resolution for events next year, whenever they return, is to break from the gravitational pull of the PowerPoint. And if I am in your audience, I hope you’ll do the same.
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