Content before form, Ladies and Gs

I wholeheartedly agree with the brilliant Jame McKenzie, whose warning against the scourge of Power Pointlessness are so a propos. Just as technologically stratospheric title pages with font changes, graphics, and pithy quotations were used in high school to distract the eye from a mediocre paper, so can zippy, zappy, ringy and zingy Power Point Presentations (my version of PPPs) distract the audience from the actual content of the presentation. Especially when they are punky high school kids, who get distracted by the word "village" (we were learning what a village was and they thought it was Greenwich Village and Greenwich Village only) much less a spiraling-outward transition between two PPP slides. McKenzie's many ideas for clarifying and simplifying presentations are useful--keep it classy, he says. And he reminds us that we should be never substituting text with effects, rather augmenting it. Clip art should be instructive if it's there at all, and if its decorative, it should be given a position that indicates so. Not front and center. What matters is the "depth and complexity" of what we have to say.

In other words, McKenzie puts the emphasis on good, ole-fashioned presentation-making skills. Maintain eye-contact. Use notes as little as possible. Keep an eye on the class and use learning probes to make sure they're keeping up. Speak with authority and energy. Your power-point presentation is in essence just a neater, more thorough, and imminently more transportable way of putting notes on the blackboard. Would you, the instructor, read off from the notes you had scribbled on the board?
Rarely, methinks.
Thank you, Jamie McKenzie, to rededicating us all to moderation in our usage of PPPs.