This week, British newspapers caught up with a story from Australia on what's wrong with PowerPoint. Emeritus Professor John Sweller of the University of New South Wales, points out that the human brain can't process an incoming text stream at the same time as its verbalisation. The result is 'death by PowerPoint'. We disengage.
Professor Sweller has probably known about this for a long time, because he discovered cognitive load in the 1980's, but he was presenting at the Cognitive Load Theory conference at the end of March and a press release was pushed out entitled "Help! My brain is overloaded!" It mentioned PowerPoint almost as a footnote. But that was enough to start the hares running.
Also this week Google's chairman and CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, couldn't resist mentioning the expected launch of a presentation web service sometime this summer as part of the free Google Docs and Spreadsheets suite. This is the result of the acquisition of Tonic Systems (Don't go looking, except in caches - Google has wiped the website.)
Schmidt suggests that this presentation application does not compete with Microsoft. He presents it as a casual sharing kind of product that "is a better fit to how people use Web 2.0".
It certainly won't have all the functionality of PowerPoint, but then who uses it all anyway?
Someone once divided web visitors into three groups: one percent create content, nine percent enrich content and 90 percent consume content. Right now, PowerPoint targets the first one percent. It looks very much as if Google is targeting the next nine percent.
If Google only takes a 'mashup' approach - grab stuff, tweak it, republish it - it will gain fans. If it goes further and provides creation tools, then it could seriously impact Microsoft's traditional business. And we might get out of the rut of ghastly corporate presentations as the more inventive members of the general public show us how they'd like things to be done.
Congratulations on being one of the few writers who have observed that the main thrust of Prof. Sweller's work is not in bashing PowerPoint. In fact, if you read his paper, which almost none of the reporters have actually done I bet, the words "PowerPoint", "presentation" and "slide" are not in the body of the paper even a single time. The paper is not about PowerPoint at all. But the media has jumped on a few words Prof. Sweller said and has distorted the true meaning of his paper. If you want a more balanced view, read this article:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com/articles/deathofppt.htm .