The last session I attended today was a thought-provoking presentation on improving the design of overhead visuals, such as the “slides” produced by PowerPoint and Keynote. Russell L. Kahn, Director of the MS in Information Design and Technology program at the SUNY Institute of Technology, shared some of the key ideas from his forthcoming article in the Journal of Educational Technology Systems.
Millions of presentations are presented every day, and most of them use some form of overhead visuals. Out of the box, PowerPoint encourages slides with a text heavy, title-with-bullet list format. Most presenters just focus on the verbal content conveyed by the text on a slide. But there are many weaknesses of this approach. Not only is the standard PowerPoint slide boring, it discourages active thinking in the audience. Students tend to just write down word for word what they see on the slide. The more text on a slide, the faster students must race to write down everything. PowerPoint’s default design encourages reductionism and oversimplification.
Posting slides on the web to discourage this behavior can help, but not much, since this can discourage students from listening to the lecture, or even attending class. Kahn said that empirical research supports this contention.
So what to do? Kahn argues for a rethinking of overhead design, with two distinguishing features. First, place a succinct, one-sentence assertion at the top of each slide. Below this, instead of a bullet list of supporting points, provide “visual evidence” in the form of a photo, diagram, map or other relevant image. Try to convey the gist of the assertion using a visual element.
He suggests that the assertion sentence should be in a 30 point sans serif font, flush left, with sentence capitalization. Subheadings, if used, should be 18-24 point. (I myself would find anything below 28 point too small to read from the back of a lecture hall. And why would he mention subheadings if he is encouraging the avoidance of bullet lists?)
Other suggestions: try to use active verbs, not passive verbs. Keep lists to 1-3 lines, with generous white space. (So I guess limited use of bullet lists is OK. Hmm.) Use presenter tools for your speaker notes, rather than using the slides. Podcast your lectures rather (or in addition to) providing slide handouts. Focus on developing presentations that are more student-centered, rather than teacher-centered.
Visuals communicate on a different level than text. A good visual can communicate much more effectively and memorably. Kahn’s approach embraces students as active thinkers and learners, rather than passive recipients of information.
Kahn points to a 2005 Virginia Tech study by Alley as evidence that his approach works. In this study of 800 students, those in courses that used the assertion-visual slide structure achieved significantly higher test scores. Retention of information was clearly higher when using visual slides rather than text-heavy slides.
I think Dr. Kahn had some good ideas in his presentation, and I applaud his campaign to move beyond text-heavy slides. I’m not sure if I agree with his assertion-visual design model, as there may be situations when only visuals are appropriate. Further, I find moving images to be even more effective for some applications. Where video is either not available or inappropriate, at least one can use tasteful animation, transparency effects or scaling to give some sense of action to static images. Toward the end of his presentation, Kahn did mention that one can put video in a PowerPoint slide, but that he had not done so. (Not to brag, but I do this all the time, as do many of my colleagues.)
Some of Dr. Kahn’s favorite web resources for visual evidence include Newseum, Flickr, Ted, Google, SIRIS and YouTube.
More information about Dr. Kahn’s work is available at his wiki at http://teachingtools.wetpaint.com.