Sticking it to Microsoft is worth a little extra effort.

University Diaries has found yet another eloquent student denunciation of PowerPoint:

What professors don’t seem to comprehend is that every one of the students in their class mastered the cool PowerPoint transitions, intricate background designs and awesome bullets systems around the age of 15. We have since ceased to be wowed by the diagonal fades and airplane noises that make the next set of bullets look like it was flown in extra-special just for us.

Heck, try 8. I’ve seen elementary school teachers teach PowerPoint to their students and then use it better than professors do at academic conferences.

Granted, there are some times when a nice figure or movie clip has really added to a lecture, and even some classes when a presentation on a project or research has really been aided by the use of a slide-based program, but I’m more wary than accepting anytime I see a flashdrive or CD-Rom come out of someone’s pocket with the words, “My Presentation.”

As I’ve become a big fan of using video clips in class, it’s nice to see them included here as a potential positive. Nevertheless, there is a good reason to keep them short. I just found a gripping and really illustrative 10-minute YouTube clip of action in Vietnam which I used in class, yet I still saw eyes glaze over around minute seven. I’m thinking now that anything over five minutes counts as disengagement no matter how good the clip is. And, of course, disengagement is exactly why PowerPoint can be so awful.

The approval of slide-based presentations here reminds me of what’s good about PowerPoint: It beats the heck of out of the alternatives. Does anyone publisher even bother printing up maps and pictures for overhead projectors anymore? Thanks to PowerPoint literally any picture from the Internet can be brought into your classroom. That is a good thing.

However, this classic New Yorker article about PowerPoint from 2001 (which I still remembered well enough to find 6+ years later, and that’s saying something) points out that the program is always a lousy excuse for the presenter to stop thinking, even though this is precisely what Microsoft designed the software to let you do.

In effect then, to use PowerPoint well in the classroom you have to teach against the way its designers intended. I, for one, think that sticking it to Microsoft is worth a little extra effort.

“You’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.”

Wow. I can’t believe Barack Obama said this:

He made health care a focus of his campaign day, visiting a hospital diabetes unit. At one point in a discussion with doctors and nurses, the talk turned to prevention of the illness in youngsters.

“If we just cut out soda pop,” it would make a difference, he said.

Asked at a later news conference about the issue, he said he hopes schools will “re-examine how easily they make soda available.”

Citing an increase in childhood obesity and diabetes, he said if children “are consuming vast amounts of soft drinks chock full of corn syrup, then we should, you know, consider whether we want to maybe have at least some zones like schools where they have to drink water once in a while.”

Notice how he emphasized corn syrup rather than soda per se. There’s good reason for singling it out, as the NYT explained in 2006:

There is little question that after beverage companies began adding high-fructose corn syrup into soda in the early 1980’s, soft-drink consumption soared. From 1980 to 2000, per-person consumption of sweetened soda rose by 40 percent, to 440 12-ounce cans a year, according to the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service. During roughly the same period, the inflation-adjusted price of soda declined by about one-third, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Also in the 1980’s, supersizing began in earnest. In 1983, for example, 7-Eleven rolled out its 44-ounce soda and, in 1988, the huge 64-ounce. And McDonald’s began supersizing its drinks in the late 80’s.

Nevertheless, I fear that Barack Obama might still face the same fate as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake:

Silly Barack Obama, you’re supposed to tell them to keep spending.

Maybe I’m naive, but the really sad thing about this story is that it shouldn’t shock me at all, yet does anyway. Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire covering the same Obama event at the University of Texas Pan-American that I wrote about a couple of days ago:

But the discussion turned to student-loan debt, and Obama wrapped up his remarks by dispensing some personal financial advice. “Just be careful about those credit cards, all right? Don’t eat out as much,” he offered. After the foreclosure crisis, he warned, “the credit cards are next in line.”

He pointed to the growth of private lenders for student loans as an example of the failure of Washington to provide enough assistance. When one student described late-night television advertisements that promise easy private loans, Obama lit up. “I’ve seen those,” he said with excitement. “Those ads are terrible! They’re all like, ‘Hey, this is fun! No problem!’ ”

That’s quite a contrast to Mr. “Take that trip to Disney World or the terrorists win.” I can’t think of a better indicator of Barack Obama’s integrity (if not his political judgment) than his willingness to come to a campus and say what people might not want to hear, but should anyways.

This line of discussion also reminds me of a remarkable book I just finished called How the University Works. The author is Marc Bousquet and perhaps the most disturbing argument backing the whole thing is that universities essentially stay afloat on cheap labor and their students’ borrowed money. Once again, that point shouldn’t be shocking but nonetheless is since most professors try to forget it.

You can find a lot more about Bousquet’s book at the author’s blog, here. For professors or students, I couldn’t recommend it more.

“Books are a big scam.”

From the Caucus blog at the NYT:

Barack Obama offered a surprising bit of advice to the students at University of Texas-Pan American.

“Books are a big scam” he said.

Say what? There were some slightly startled chuckles from the students.

“I taught law at the University of Chicago for 10 years,” he explained. “One of the biggest scams is law professors write their own textbooks and then assign it to their students, and they make a mint.

“It’s a huge racket,” he added.

He’s right, you know.

The same is true of history texts, with a new edition every three or four years with little more than a resorting of the same old information and lots of new extras that nobody ever uses.

I wonder what President Obama is going to do about it?

Still more about reading.

When I started my own blog a few weeks ago, the last thing I expected to do is to keep writing about reading (like I did here or here). This has mostly been the result of my continual encounter with a slowly evolving reaction to that National Endowment for the Arts report, “To Read or Not to Read.”

In his blog at the NYT, Timothy Egan (who wrote the best book you’ll ever find on the Dust Bowl) got set off not by the NEA, but by a “reading is dead” comment from none other than Steve Jobs. You can read his very polite Jobs take down for yourself. I just want to note two interesting stats in his post. First:

When Jobs cited the 40-percent-who-don’t-read figure, he was no doubt referring to a hand-wringing and possibly erroneous 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts. “This report documents a national crisis,” the chairman, Dana Gioia, said at the time. Message from the cultural elite: read, you morons, and eat your spinach while you’re at it!

Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller number — 27 percent — had not read a book lately, which means nearly three-in-four have read a book.

That doesn’t sound too bad now, does it? But then there’s this:

The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.

Pardon me to spoil the party, but it would be interesting to know the income range from which that 27% came. If they are, as I suspect, mostly educated and rich, that is no reason to celebrate. Reading won’t be dead, but a huge segment of the population is still probably not exercising the skills it needs to get the kind of jobs that require…well, that require reading.

This isn’t an education issue to my eyes. It’s a class issue.

“The Water Cure”

This is the most timely and appropriate use of American history to influence a contemporary political argument that I have ever seen.  And the name Bush doesn’t even come up once.

Mind-freedom on the job.

The NYT has an article today that describes one of my favorite practices in all of American labor history:

OF all the repetitive, mind-numbing jobs in the late 19th century, cigar-rolling was special.

Unlike sewing clothes, mining coal or forging steel, it was blessedly quiet. And thus cigar workers, whether in Chicago or Havana, were the first ones in their time who managed to introduce that vital commodity — distraction — onto the work floor.

Using their own wages, and backed by a powerful union, they paid for a “reader” who sat in an elevated chair and began the morning with the news and political commentary. By the afternoon, he would usually have switched to a popular novel. The 100 or so rollers on the floor were his captive audience, listening as they worked.

My friend Jon and I put an excerpt from American Federation of Labor President and one-time cigar maker Samuel Gompers describing this same practice in our labor history reader so I have instant access to a little more detail:

These things a good cigarmaker learned to do more or less mechanically, which left us free to think, talk, listen or sing. I loved the freedom of that work, for I had earned the mind-freedom that accompanied skill as a craftsman.

Much to the credit of the NYT reporter, they don’t necessarily see this mind freedom as a bad thing.  Nevertheless, I find it rather depressing that when the nature of a job makes mind-freedom possible, employers can still find it controversial.

The problem is the words, not the pictures.

I’ve been reading anti-Power Point posts at University Diaries for months now. Nevertheless, I started using PowerPoint presentations in my survey class last semester and they proved very popular. An article from the Guardian Margaret Soltan linked to over there explains why:

Does anyone else hate PowerPoint? At conferences and meetings, I inwardly groan as speakers load up their ponderous projections. I don’t mind maps and pictures, but all those words of text drive me crazy. “And now for my introduction …” and up comes the word “introduction”. ‘”There are four main points” and we see “four points”.

Exactly. I use PowerPoint like a slide projector – pictures with almost no text. That way the presentation adds to the lecture rather than replaces it. Indeed, there are so many fantastic pictures readily available on the Web with which to teach modern American history, I think professors are committing educational malpractice if they don’t use PowerPoint for this topic.

But don’t write out everything you want to say on the slides. It puts me to sleep just thinking about it.

Blaming the victim.

Every blog I read seems to be considering this essay from Susan Jacoby today. It is rather. . . I don’t know what the best word for it is. How about I settle for opinionated? Take this slice for example:

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

That pretty much covers everything, doesn’t it? Since, much to my surprise, I keep writing about reading here, let’s look at the details she offers for this particular gripe:

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book — fiction or nonfiction — over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Certainly, none of these trends are good things, but I’m not convinced this is anything new. As Ursula Le Guin has noted, throughout history, most working class people haven’t read books. Until 150 years or so ago, it would have been a feat for them to even be able to read.

Certainly, more Americans have the ability to read than ever before, but when do they have the time to do it? There’s competition for people’s time from video games and movies, but there’s also competition for people’s time from work, even among the college-educated. The need to hold down multiple jobs to pay your mortgage or your health insurance strikes me as an excellent reason not to read a book over the course of a year. Ignoring that aspect of people’s lives is indeed elitist.

Don’t get me wrong, I think people should choose to read and if you’re going to take college courses you certainly should read the books I assign you because that is your job as a student. However, to suggest that video and video games are making people stupid is just wrong-headed. It’s blaming the victim.

Fix the rising gap between rich and poor in America and I bet more people would read more books and go to school for longer than if we just destroyed every DVD player and Wii console tomorrow.

It’s enough to make me miss Richard Nixon.

Substitute “Iraq” for “Vietnam” and I’d vote for the presidential candidate that ran this ad in a heartbeat.