Thursday, April 21, 2005

PowerPoint Issues

This thread started with a newsletter from MindJet, the mind mapping software folks, announcing that they had a new blog.

Michael Schrage has a wonderful article on the 2x2 matrix and PowerPoint for presentations in strategy+business.

This took me to Cliff Atkinson's sociablemedia.com.

And it dawned on me that I must cover "the world's most popular authoring tool," in Informal Learning. Tufte, Gettysburg, the horror of presos without notes, mindless bullet-point reduction, upside ops with Breeze and good graphics. Sun and the JCS eschew PowerPoint. World Bank story. Confines.

Here's the Beyond Bulletpoints site. "As much as people might blame Microsoft for enforcing a bullet-point culture, it is really organizations that enforce it through their templates and lack of an organizational strategy for their PowerPoint-based communications. " Or "When you shift the dynamic of every presentation from self-centered to audience-centered, the other people in the room get to be the ones at the center of the action. "

Cliff structures PPTs as stories, not presentations.

If you're a knowledge worker and you don't work for Sun Microsystems, you're going to create and deliver PowerPoint presentations, listen to PowerPoint presentations, coach the people who work for you on making PowerPoint presentations, and sit through the good, the bad and the ugly. Since you're going to learn and teach via PowerPoint, it's worth taking a little time to learn to do it right.

I have consulted with organizations that use PowerPoint to capture research. Others use PowerPoint instead of memos. It's one way to introduce graphics into our word-obsessed culture.

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