PowerPoint as a Presentation Medium

"Theorizing" PowerPoint

• What was PPT designed to do? What audience was it intended to be effective with?

business, persons with interest in subject, focused audience, people who want the bottom line in bulleted points (little fuzziness or ambiguity)
 

• What are some of PPT's most important features and functions?
  
   
• Why is PPT also applicable to general users?  Why do people find it useful and attractive?
   

provides a graphic medium for expression, simple or more complicated; colorful and "different"; playful yet serious; fairly easy to use at a basic level; allows personalized expression (no boring 1-inch margins and black on white type)
 

• In what ways does PPT adapt/change older forms of media? 

What older media is applicable here?  print; flip chart; whiteboard; blackboard; photographic slides; movies; audio and video tape; overhead projector
 

How does it look back to older technology? terminology--slides, animations, layout, background, bullets, pictures and movies
 

• What are PPT's greatest strengths and potential weaknesses in literacy contexts? (Such as in schools and universities)

Strengths:

• interesting appearance/colorful, decorative, dynamic
• ease of use
• flexibility for various presentation media and formats
• widely known and used
• platform for development of visual rhetoric
   

Weaknesses:

• issue of access--need a computer and a way to project image for audience or allow browsing
• issue of effect on discourse: tends to simplify discourse down to bulleted words or phrases; it's an accompaniment to speech, not a substitute for it