Good Powerpoints? (Response to Hailey)

(See http://www.xanga.com/HaileySheetsBSU/ for Hailey's post)

"Is it not possible to create a good PowerPoint presentation?"

Here I hope are a couple answers you your question. Interestingly, both of these defy, in some measure, the logic implicit in the design of Powerpoint.

1) http://jepaschkejoh.iweb.bsu.edu/Peer_Response_for_Privateers.ppt

The innovation in this Powerpoint slideshow, which presents Elbow and Belanoff's Sharing and Responding, begins really on slide 6. I take the visual map in Elbow and Belanoff's book link parts of the map to other slides explaining the concepts, thus breaking the linearity implicit to Powerpoint. When I presented this, my audience was allowed to choose which points on the map we collectively visited. I even conceptualized an incarnation of this for use with students during Peer Response, allowing them to roll dice that would dictate the point on the map they visited, thus what method of peer response they used in their group.

2) http://jepaschkejoh.iweb.bsu.edu/lcs/Silent%20Movie.wmv

This one, now formatted as a movie, was entirely designed in Powerpoint. When I presented I included the soundtrack you hear in the movie. As in a silent movie, the audience viewed the black and white stills and read the captions to themselves. After giving the audience time to read each caption, I conveyed more in depth concepts related to the captions they just read. The only different between the movie you see now and the Powerpoint presentation is that the movie, implemented in Movie Maker, allowed for visual effects such as the broken, snapping "Aged" film look and the "Ken Burns" effect in which the field of vision pans across the still.