The trick though is that students need to be willing to go out on a limb. High school teaches too many students to wait for the answer they need to write down, and not to ask questions or to try nut things out themselves. This behaviour carries over to university.

I try to be shameless in class – asking even the ‘dumbest’ questions – in the hope that I get in answer, and that others will benefit by it.

Of course, I might just be a blabbermouth. Ken?

(1) The Bore – Stands up the front and reads 32 PowerPoint slides word for word. Shows no passion on enthusiasm for the class they are teaching. Regrettably all too common. On the other hand, the Bore is useful because you can safely skip class altogether and just read through the lecture notes in 15 minutes at some later date.

(2) The Rambler – Has slides and/or notes, but ignores them almost completely. Has a tendency to go off on irrelevant tangents and recount “amusing” anecdotes for 40 minutes of the hour. Will typically randomly skip forward and back between slides because their points are covered out of order. The worst ramblers verbally contradict what’s written in the notes and then remind you that “all lecture material is examinable”.

(3) The Puppetmaster – Believes that students need interactivity to maintain attention span and maximise learning. Unfortunately, their definition of “interactivity” means trailing off in the middle of every third sentence hoping that a student will …? (fill in the final words). The awkward silence each time as the lecturer waits for a student who isn’t asleep/hungover/playing Solitaire on their laptop destroys the narrative continuity of the lecture and leads to acture embarrassment for 70% of students.

It might seem callous, but as a student all you really cared about was making sure you had enough information to pass. From this perspective, Powerpoint was fantastic because it was almost guaranteed to contain information which would be examined later.

The very best lecturers did just what James suggests: They provided all key information up front in the Powerpoint slides and then augmented this with more detail in their talk. Examples strengthened the points being made by including ‘volunteers from the audience’ or more general audience Q&A session.

This meant two really big benefits: lectures were still worth attending to get a deeper understanding of the subject, but the basics were all in front of you, on paper.

Truth is lecturing is a poor teaching method, no matter what technological marvels are used in the process. Nevertheless it continues to dominate because (a) that’s the way it’s always been and (2) it’s very cost-effective compared to inter-active teaching methods.

Or in Faustus

You might also enjoy Einstein’s 05 performance review:
http://norvig.com/performance-review.html

From Peter Norvig, a noted computer scientist and I believe CTO at Google these days.

But I agree, I’ve seen alot of good PowerPoint presentations although never done one myself. My classes benefit greatly from having large, clear pictures to illustrate the topic, also graphs, timelines etc — vastly superior to any quality you can get via OHP or photocopies. My heart does sink a bit though when I see its going to be PP: it inevitably means at least several minutes of faffing about setting up the technology.