All entries for Thursday 25 October 2007

Lecture styles

Quite frankly any lecture who thinks it is ok to present examinable material through PowerPoint needs a good hiding!

Problems:

i) It is hard enough trying to keep up to date with what is being done in a lecture without having to read and listen at the same time! For example, it is expected of course that we as students should take notes. Yes that is reasonable, but how are we supposed to do that whilst listening to potentially important information that is being said by the lecturer? You can't. So it seems to me that what you actually write down as notes is a bit of a gamble. If I write what they say perhaps it will come up in the exam, if I don't and chose to write something from the slides perhaps I will not know what to do for a particular question in the exam. I thought exams were about testing a students knowledge on a subject rather than testing whether or not they can write down the important facts in lectures.

ii) There is no interactivity. I like to understand a lot of what is presented to me in a lecture, in the lecture. This normally is the case, as with derivations and such like they are written down with an overhead projector - this is good, as you write the derivation down you understand what you are doing. However, when you see a huge equation on a PowerPoint slide the only feeling you get is "Where the hell did that come from". That is simply no good.

Solution: Scrap PowerPoint and any lecturer who insists on using it.

It should be renamed to Not-very-PowerfulPoint.

: 25 Oct 2007 18:09 |  Tags: Powerpoint |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem