your anecdote is a sad reminder of how PP has taken over the teaching process in disciplines like Business. Eevry time I hear something like that I am glad, despite the terrible job market, that I am in English.

As for students seeing PP as the only option, I actually very tentatively recommended to a group of students last night that they consider NOT using PP for their presentation and I thought they were going to lynch me. The very idea of not using PP and not using index cards or not reading from a pre-prepared written presentation was entirely anethema to them.

The idea of talking extemporaneously and knowledgeably about a subject (in other words having good presentation skills) was just not on their radar.

This is a good follow-up post to your last one, since it’s a solid reminder of the complexity to the discussion around “technology in the classroom”– which is a hugely variable mixed bag. Yes, the requisite (and costly) computers can lead to an over-reliance on uninspired PowerPoint, but Bowen also reminds us that podcasts can free up precious class time.

Speaking of PP reliance problems, this week in a rehearsal I confronted something I’d never encountered before: a group of accounting students delivered a presentation that was crafted around the textbook publisher’s PowerPoint slides (which their professor posts to Blackboard to correspond with each chapter). They didn’t see a reason to create their own PP slides– and they also saw no problem with using the publisher slides without modification or analysis. (A few of the slides were strangely organized and some clearly needed an instructor’s manual in order to give the examples context.) I wondered if this approach to PP was in part due to what has been modeled for them throughout their educational career?