Power Point, Habits Of Mind, And Classroom Culture

J. CURRICULUM STUDIES , 2006, VOL . 38, NO. 4, 389–411PowerPoint, habits of mind, and classroom cultureCATHERINE ADAMSTaylor and Francis LtdTCUS_A_157897.sgm10.1080/00220270600579141Journal of Curriculum Studies0022-0272 (print)/1366-5839 (online)Original Article2006Taylor & Francis0000000002006CatherineAdamsadamsc@macewan.caIn lecture halls, in secondary school classrooms, during training workshops, and at researchconferences, PowerPoint is becoming a preferred method of communicating, presenting,and sharing knowledge. Questions have been raised about the implications of the use of thisnew medium for knowledge dissemination. It is suggested PowerPoint supports a cognitiveand pedagogical style inconsistent with both the development of higher analytical thinkingskills and the acquisition of rich narrative and interpretive understanding. This paper exam-ines how PowerPoint invites and seduces educators to reshape knowledge in particular ways,and subsequently how this knowledge is presented to students in the classroom. The partic-ular forms of knowing, relating, and presenting with PowerPoint are decided in part byteacher habituation to the software tool’s default patterns, but also by the very nature of thepresentation medium itself.Keywords: computer uses in education; lecture method; Microsoft PowerPoint; multimedia materials; phenomenology; visual aids.A medium is a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it givesform to a culture’s politics, social organization, and habitual ways of thinking(Postman 2000: 10).Of late, PowerPoint1 is suffering from more than a few detractors. On theheels of Tufte (2003a) declaring PowerPoint ‘evil’, the Columbia AccidentInvestigation Board partially implicates NASA’s ubiquitous use of Power-Point in the shuttle tragedy (Langewiesche 2003). And, despite musicianDavid Byrne’s (2003) much touted foray into PowerPoint ‘art’, some sittingin the audience would agree PowerPoint presentations often leave some-thing to be desired. As a medium for teaching and learning, PowerPointincreasingly finds its way to school classrooms, lecture halls, and conferencepodiums. However, while some questions are being raised by media schol-ars, PowerPoint usage among educators seems to be relatively unreflectiveand taken for granted.Much of the educational literature on PowerPoint has focused on ‘how-to’ advice and occasional exemplar uses in the classroom. Survey datasuggest students find PowerPoint a useful cognitive tool and the providedelectronic files and slide printouts helpful for review (Frey and Birnbaum2002). Teachers using presentation software are described generally asCatherine Adams, a faculty member in the Department of Computing Science, Faculty ofScience, Grant MacEwan College, City Centre Campus, 10700-104 Avenue, Edmonton, AB,Canada T5J 4S2; e-mail: adamsc@macewan.ca, teaches technology tools for teachers andintroductory programming for engineers. Her research interests include using hermeneuticphenomenological methodology to examine the pedagogical significance of computer-technology tools in the classroom.Journal of Curriculum Studies ISSN 0022–0272 print/ISSN 1366–5839 online ©2006 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsDOI: 10.1080/00220270600579141390C. ADAMS‘more organized’. However, a recent poll of 4500 undergraduates in the US(Young 2004) reveals significant student unhappiness with the way technol-ogy, particularly PowerPoint, is being employed in lecture halls.From a visual communications perspective, Tufte (2003b: 22) calculates‘the PP [PowerPoint] slide format has probably the worst signal/noise ratioof any known method of communication on paper or computer screen’. Thissoftware package ‘elevates format over content’ (Tufte 2003a), turningeverything into a sales pitch. Tufte maintains that PowerPoint supports acognitive style inconsistent with the development of higher analytical think-ing skills. Turkle (2004: 102) defers judging ‘a product of the culturalassumptions of the Western corporate boardroom’, yet she, too, has littledoubt PowerPoint ‘affects our habits of mind’.There has always been a deep link between humankind and ourmachines. Our tools or techne extend our reach, abilities, sensory perception,locomotion, and understanding. In adopting a tool, we invite it to enhance,or more dramatically, transform what we do and how we perceive the world.Wielding his famous hammer, Heidegger (1962: 98) points out that ‘the lesswe just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and useit, the more primordial does our relationship to it become’. Each transfor-mation is sealed quietly as the latest ‘life-altering gadget’ (Richer 2004) iswoven transparently into the fabric of our lives as new activities and thoughtsare enabled by it, and a measure of dependence is felt. The adopted toolbecomes a necessary appendage, a happy burden (Borgmann 2002), allow-ing us to sustain our lives in the style to which we have become accustomed.Thus, it may be naïve to perceive the new technologies arriving in class-rooms as ‘just an assemblage of machines and their accompanying software.[Each new technology] embodies a form of thinking that orients a person toapproach the world in a particular way’ (Apple 1991: 75). As teachers seizethe PowerPoint hammer as a tool to enhance teaching practices, somequestions should be examined: ● What forms of thinking, what styles of teaching and learning, areeducators and students becoming accustomed to?● Does PowerPoint privilege particular modes of knowing over others?● How exactly might PowerPoint affect habits of mind?‘Habits of mind’: Cathedrals and other architectures of experienceThe architectural spaces people design, build, and inhabit decide in subtleand sometimes significant ways their activities thereafter. For example,‘when we walk off a crowded street into a cathedral, our whole demeanourchanges even if we are not alert to it. We relax in its cool darkness that solicitsmeditativeness’ (Dreyfus and Spinosa 2003: 346). Churchill suggests aneven stronger thesis: ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards, our buildingsshape us’.2 However, it is not simply architectural structures that so shapeus. All objects invite us to extend or change our relationship to our world.These enhancements or transformations can be minor to profound, but thePOWERPOINT HABITS OF MIND, AND CLASSROOM CULTURE391full spectrum of effects is often unanticipated and unseen until the object isintegrated transparently into our lives. And by then, life is different; we maywonder only how we lived without this or that gadget. Mobile phones, forexample, have altered dramatically the way some of us stay in touch with oneanother, challenging and reframing previously stable notions such asavailability and autonomy, and public and private spaces (Arnold 2003).Illich (1996) coins the phrase le milieu technique to refer to the irresistibleembrace of the high technology environs we find ourselves dwelling in today.The technological milieu is shaping substantially—insinuating itself, habitu-ating us, and simultaneously reinterpreting—how we act in and perceive theworld. In order to understand how this occurs, Illich (1996: 64) asks us ‘tolisten to what [modern] objects [of technology] say, rather than do’. To ‘hear’what an object of technology might be saying to us, we must enter the realmof lived experience, and orient ourselves to pre-reflective or ‘pathic’ knowing.Within the situated, relational, embodied context of lived space, allobjects may be heard as invitations. Straus (1966) calls this invitation thepathic quality of a thing. Van Manen (1997: 21) illustrates this point: ‘coolwater invites us to drink, the sandy beach invites the child to play, an easychair invites our tired body to sink in it’. In an analogous fashion, Turkle (inCoutu 2003) suggests PowerPoint ‘is not just a tool but an evocative objectthat affects our habits of mind’. What then is PowerPoint’s vocative invita-tion to teachers, to students? And how might this presentation softwareshape ‘our habits of mind’?The PowerPoint invitationBefore tackling the question of how PowerPoint might shape people’s habitsof thinking, I shall consider briefly the invitational address PowerPointmakes to a teacher as he or she constructs a PowerPoint presentation. Inecessarily overlook the experiential subtleties that characterize Power-Point’s invitation to a teacher in the immediacy of the classroom, as well asthe multi-faceted address this medium presents to students: a careful explo-ration of these topics would extend well beyond this paper. However, acursory inquiry provides both an initial flavour for the complex vocativeappeal PowerPoint makes to a teacher and a glimpse of his or her responseto that appeal.It must be first acknowledged that the PowerPoint software package is aproduct designed primarily for the Western corporate marketplace. That thespecial interests and demands of this sector are built into virtually everydesign decision of PowerPoint’s architecture comes as no surprise. Indeed,this is hardly a failing of PowerPoint, but an historical fact. A useful analogyis to compare the architectural design of an office building with that of aschool. Both buildings are recognized as different structures with differentfunctions. In using this Microsoft Office productivity software tool, a teacheris in some ways charged with re-fashioning a space especially designed foroffice use into a liveable classroom.Entering the PowerPoint application, a teacher is immediately invited toconstruct a presentation in one of the following ways. He or she may begin392C. ADAMSwith the ‘blank’ presentation consisting of a title slide, followed by a seriesof regular slides, each offered with a large, centred title above a box ofbulleted, textual information or points. There are variations on this theme,of course. The presentation author is also invited to select a ‘designtemplate’, one of a variety of professional quality, business-friendly back-grounds, with the option to vary the colour scheme. PowerPoint’s thirdsuggestion for new presentation creation is the AutoContent Wizard.Constructing a short teaching presentation using the AutoContent Wizardcan provide a memorable demonstration of how PowerPoint’s user-friendli-ness may at moments turn heavy-handed and highly prescriptive.In the typical ‘blank’ default slide (see figure 1), PowerPoint presents ateacher with a relatively straightforward invitation. There are two enjoinders:‘Click to add title’, and ‘Click to add text’. A slide-set author is thus invitedto first title the slide, and then to add information in bulleted format. Indeed,to not incur bulleted text at this juncture, an author must ‘erase’ the bulletand adjust the text placement, or de-select bulleting using the bullet tool, ordelete or ignore the bullet text box and insert a regular text box in its place.Figure 1.PowerPoint default slide.Each of these work-around actions requires a user to have somefamiliarity with this or similar software. Still, given the stipulation that theslide text is readable by all in a room, some abbreviation of the presentationmaterial seems quite understandable. Thus, in preparing a presentationusing PowerPoint, a teacher is confronted with two questions. First, whatinformation should be presented on each slide? Clearly, information mustbe broken into discrete bits to fit on each slide. Secondly, how might eachFigure 1.PowerPoint default slide.POWERPOINT HABITS OF MIND, AND CLASSROOM CULTURE393segment of information be best represented? PowerPoint suggests bulletedtext.Note that PowerPoint is merely inviting, not compelling, an author toformat his or her knowledge as bullet points. Other formats and approachesmay be tried. Yet, it must be admitted that the invitation in the defaultslide—to bullet—is taken up by many. As a general rule, heavy reliance ondefault patterns in design (a feature common to many user-friendly soft-ware packages) yields products bearing a similar look-and-feel, regardlessof the creator. Some architectural software packages, for example, ‘urgearchitects to create roofs with lots of little peaks, under each of whicharched windows are now the requisite fashion’ (Searls 1998: 3). The resultis many houses that look remarkably similar to one another, each being avariation on a few default themes rather than a truly original creation.Although such software may allow homes to be built more inexpensively(less architect time is presumably incurred, and standardized materials aremanufactured more cheaply ‘en masse’ corresponding to these defaults),templating may sometimes get in the way of responding creatively to indi-vidual homeowner’s needs and aesthetic preferences. On the one hand,PowerPoint default slides and templates ease the process of organizing apresentation, particularly if one is willing to use and adept at bulletinginformation. On the other hand, teachers wishing to tailor presentations tomatch their personal teaching styles may need to work actively around thedefaults, which may sometimes take more than a modicum of thought andknow-how.Thus, in seizing hold of PowerPoint as a tool, a teacher is simultaneouslyaided, enmeshed, and constrained by particular design decisions embeddedin this software. PowerPoint is, after all, part of a sophisticated, pre-programmed (that is, anticipated) conversation taken up by and with ateacher, urging him or her to organize and present knowledge in a certainway. This particular way is evoked primarily through ease of access to defaultpatterns or templates. Moreover, the particularity of this way (the dialoguethat develops between PowerPoint and an author working towards repre-senting the subject matter at hand, and culminating in a .ppt file) may rangefrom being highly regulated by the software (e.g. the AutoContent Wizard)to more teacher-decided (e.g. starting with a ‘blank presentation’ and flexingthe software to meet one’s own teaching style or aesthetic sensibilities).Indeed, it may only be a creative teacher, an experienced rhetor, or athoughtful, practised user who thinks to venture much beyond the Power-Point defaults. An unassisted novice, a new teacher, or a busy lecturer maybe more inclined to accept as given the PowerPoint defaults in forming theirpresentations, and subsequently the ideas about how they will present theirmaterial. And this is understandably so because, particularly when we ashumans are navigating an unfamiliar environment or are under timeconstraints, we gladly accept or fall into the most accessible, appealinginvitation at hand. In the case of PowerPoint, ‘ease of use’ equates with highinvitational appeal. As educators, we are inclined to choose the option thatseems to offer the simplest, quickest path to our desired end—a good teach-ing presentation. With these considerations in mind, I turn now to thenotion of habits, and ‘habits of mind’.394C. ADAMSHow can PowerPoint shape ‘habits of mind’?A habit is ‘a constant, often unconscious inclination to perform some act,acquired through its frequent repetition; an established trend of the mind’(Houghton-Mifflin Dictionary). A habit is that which we as humans findourselves doing. We become accustomed, habituated to things; we get usedto them over time. Habit comes from the Latin verb, habere, meaning tohold, have, or possess. Taking hold of an object, we also take up residencein it; we inhabit it, but it also inhabits us. In the words of Merleau-Ponty(1962: 143), ‘To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted intothem, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body.Habit expresses our power of dilating our being in the world.’ Habit allowsus to expand and settle into the world, to extend ourselves. For example, totry writing with a keyboard is at first awkward. So much time is occupiedlooking at the lettered keys and checking the result on the screen; it is quiteimpossible to follow a complete train of thought. Over time, and perhapsimproved by deliberate training, our fingers gradually learn the landscape;they become habituated to the keyboard environment. Merleau-Ponty callsthis acquired habit or skill ‘knowledge in the hands’. Our habituated fingersnow serve us silently, falling transparently into our background, allowing usto settle into the higher-level business at hand: writing. However, now tryreplacing the familiar QWERTY keyboard with the unfamiliar Dvorak. Ourpoor fingers will demand attention immediately! Then once more (for atime) the activity of writing will not come so easily.Habit gives ‘our life the form of generality, and develops our personalacts into stable dispositional tendencies’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 146). Ourbodies tend towards the equilibrium of habit, forming patterns of familiarityand thus freeing us to build upon and project ourselves well beyond ‘knowl-edge in the hands’, to expand our being in the world. What is it then tobecome habituated to, to get used to PowerPoint?With each new slide that a teacher composes, a certain habit, a knowingin the hands, is developing, slowly gathering confidence and transparentlysettling in as pattern. PowerPoint helps in the organization of a clear,concise, and complete lecture from start to finish. In the process, a teachermay take up PowerPoint’s tempting invitation to reconstruct subject knowl-edge as bulleted information. He or she may be unused to arranging lecturematerials in this manner. In doing so, a teacher becomes more and moreaccustomed to, and adept at, abbreviating the subject knowledge and itspractices in short, pithy phrases rather than composing full sentences.Parker (2001: 78) humourously notes how PowerPoint seems to promote acertain mode of thinking: ‘Last week I caught myself planning out (in myhead) the slides I would need to explain to my wife why we couldn’t afforda vacation this year’. As a teacher seizes hold of PowerPoint as a tool ofteaching, he or she necessarily begins to think in terms of the form itsuggests. At minimum, a teacher must think in slides, reconfiguring his orher knowledge in the new 4:3 rectangular landscape delineated by Power-Point. The software readily assists in this project by inviting a teacher toconsider certain formats: to title each slide, to re-form subject material asabbreviated, bulleted points.POWERPOINT HABITS OF MIND, AND CLASSROOM CULTURE395Of course, PowerPoint allows for the representation and later presenta-tion of knowledge in other modes than point form. For example, if a teacherhas ready access to them, relevant digitized images, sounds, or videos areeasily imported and integrated as slides or parts of slides. Complex narrativeexposition or story may be distributed across several discrete slides to belater sewn back together through the continuous flow and knowing presenceof the teacher’s voice, or perhaps situated as an extemporary prompt on asingle slide from which the presenter digresses and to which he or she laterreturns. Atkinson (2005), writing primarily to the business audience,entreats presenters to move ‘beyond bullets’ and invent presentations thattake advantage of the tremendous possibilities the PowerPoint slide paletteprovides.Nonetheless, it is important to notice how PowerPoint users seem to fallinto certain ways of doing things, patterns of behaviour that suggest them-selves right from the beginning. People talk about falling into step, falling inline. In a sense, falling is something that happens to us, or we happen uponit, something we find ourselves in or doing (as in falling in love). Habituationcan also be exactly this: slipping into the easiest, most accessible, efficientpath and seldom thinking to diverge from it. In this way, habit is both abilityand disability. I have already explored a few of PowerPoint’s appealinglysimple invitations to a new user that are taken up by many: to use theMicrosoft-provided templates to title and bullet slide-text.Quite unintentionally, from the Microsoft software-designers’ perspec-tive, PowerPoint’s user-friendliness (which relies on default patterning) issimultaneously foreclosing other forms of knowledge through lack of habit-ual (easy) access. Software-designers may recognize here one of their coredesign dilemmas: how to accurately and sensitively balance ease of use, andthus adoptability, against early constraint and lack of user freedom? A keychallenge for the software-designer is how to progressively reveal all of thepower of the software through short shallow transitions, as needed, and thento make it obvious and easy later on to access further transitions when theuser is ready to exercise new possibilities. Often the trade-off between powerand early adoptability may result in sub-optimal, overly constrained condi-tions for anyone who is not a master. Of course, this is also a core teachingand learning challenge: how to progress each student from minimal skill tomastery with the least effort? PowerPoint’s AutoContent Wizard is just suchan attempt at a software answer to this problem, with predictable results.Default patterns are another way to provide users with early success,although through less directive means than a typical wizard. However,defaults also impose constraints. Defaults are decisions made by the soft-ware-designer on behalf of the user, so that the user can get on with the taskat hand.For educational use in particular, it must be borne in mind that thedefault settings have been chosen for business and sales audiences. Again, itis not that PowerPoint necessarily precludes other ways of presenting ideasin a wide variety of knowledge forms; but rather, these other ways are lessfrequently represented, simply because it may not be immediately apparentto a teacher how to form them in this medium, how to step away from thedefault settings and explore other possibilities. To do so requires thoughtful396C. ADAMSinitiative, that is, wakefulness to the habituating trends embedded in Power-Point’s user interface and a willingness to flex it in other directions, or tochoose not to use it when it is inappropriate to the teaching task.Thus far, I have painted a rather accusatory portrait of PowerPoint,suggesting its architecture exerts a kind of soft determinism upon a sleepyteacher-user, by turns inviting him or her to try certain ways of preparing alesson or lecture (and not others). I have further proposed that, throughwidespread user-habituation to the particular presentation practicesinherent in PowerPoint default slides and templates, this software may beenacting real changes in the way teachers think about their subject matterand how their discipline is subsequently represented and presented tostudents. Such determinism, that is, ‘the imposition willy-nilly of newcultural grounds by the action of new technologies’, McLuhan and McLu-han (1988: 127–128) assert, ‘is only possible while the users are “well-adjusted”—sound asleep’. The inevitable tendency of any given technologyto enact its ‘vortex of side-effects’ is counterbalanced by each user’s willing-ness to pay attention, to remain focused on the purposeful task at hand—inthis case, teaching.McLuhan (1964: 30) suggests that all media, indeed, all artefacts, exertinvisible ‘lines of force’ that tend to develop into predictable trends. It is onlyby: standing aside from any structure or medium, that its principles and lines offorce can be discerned. For any medium has the power of imposing its ownassumption on the unwary. Prediction and control consist in avoiding thissubliminal state of Narcissus trance. But the greatest aid to this end is simplyin knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the firstbars of a melody.I have made an initial exploration of the first bar of PowerPoint’smelody. To venture further, McLuhan provides a framework for discerningthe overall effects any artefact exerts on both its active and passive users.McLuhan’s power pointsLaws of Media is McLuhan and McLuhan’s (1988) attempt to encapsulatethe efforts of phenomenologists like Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, and Heideggerto reveal the hidden effects of technologies by employing a relatively simpleformula. He poses four questions of every technology: ● What does [the medium] enhance or intensify?● What does it render obsolete or displace?● What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?● What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme? (p. 7).The responses to these questions, known as the ‘four laws of media’, are thencomposed as a tetrad held in a complex set of poetic tensions. The tetradintends to focus attention on dynamic ‘situations that are still in process,situations that are restructuring new perceptions and shaping new environ-ments, even while they are restructuring old ones’ (p. 116). Thus, the tetradindicates simultaneous (not sequential) effects: POWERPOINT HABITS OF MIND, AND CLASSROOM CULTURE397All human artefacts are human utterances, or outerings, and as such theyare linguistic and rhetorical entities. At the same time, the etymology of allhuman technologies is to be found in the human body itself: they are, as itwere, prosthetic devices, mutations, metaphors of the body or its parts. Thetetrad is exegesis on four levels, showing not the mythic, but the logos-structure of each artefact, and giving its four ‘parts’ as metaphor, or word(p. 128).In composing a tetrad, it is helpful to reflect on the more extreme exam-ples—both positive and negative—as well as on the more mundane of atechnology’s uses, in an effort to tease out unusual textures, the hiddentrends. The purpose is to gain insight into how a given technology canboth enhance and disrupt, and ultimately reshape current practices inunexpected ways.Below, I venture my own tetrad for PowerPoint (figure 2). I thenexplore some of the dimensions of the PowerPoint ‘utterance’ through aseries of textual vignettes. Each section is intended to declare not certaintybut tendency of effect, drawing attention to both worrisome shoal andpedagogical possibility inherent in this software. Like McLuhan, I takepoetic license with these observations, playing with figure, then ground, inan attempt to loosen some of the threads binding, and sometimes blinding,thinking. In doing so, my focus resides primarily on the tensions tuggingamong four medial laws of enhancement, retrieval, reversal, and obsoles-cence, for it is here that PowerPoint’s dynamic lines of force are to berevealed.Figure 2.PowerPoint tetrad.Figure 2.PowerPoint tetrad.398C. ADAMSA PowerPoint tetradPointing powerfullyPowerPoint enhances, quite literally, the ability or power to point. Throughthis software, a teacher can now point more accurately, vividly, and rapidlyat text and image—digitized photographs, diagrams, charts, film clips, webpages. Indeed, pointing, or the act of signifying, is a central activity of peda-gogical practice. Teachers point things out, illustrate different points ofview, and get straight to the point. They may even point wordlessly to thestudent with raised hand, not knowing or having forgotten his or her name.Or they may point enigmatically at the mere existence of something, thesheer wonder of something unnameable. One way or another, teachers hopethey are pointing their students in a right or worthwhile direction.A thing does not exist in a meaningful sense until it is signified, that is,an object has no significance until it is pointed out, at, or to. Our most basiccommunicative technology, language, may be understood as a sophisticatedpointing device. Words themselves are not the actual things they name,rather words point to things. The word ‘chair’, whether uttered out loud orrendered in print, is not itself a chair, but points to the eidos chair. ‘Chair’calls to mind or refers directly to an object used for sitting on. As such,naming evokes or calls a thing into existence. Pointing, whether accom-plished with a finger or through the extension of some pointing instrument—linguistic, artistic, or otherwise—brings a thing to attention, and thus tosignificance.The activity of pointing need not be direct. A metaphor, for instance,points to a thing by creating a poetic tension between two unlike, yet like,things. The metaphor, ‘teacher as midwife’, points by juxtaposing two unlikethings to indicate a third other, in this case, a novel understanding of the roleof a teacher. A metaphor is thus a ‘reference to absence’ (Levinas 1996: 36),a pointer to something not yet visible. A true or lively metaphor, one that hasnot yet fallen into the common lexicon, is a pointer or referent to that whichcurrently has no direct label and is, thus, not usually perceived by others.PowerPoint itself does not point to actual things, but facilitates theprojection of pointers, for example, words and images. PowerPoint alsoallows for the projection of indirect pointers, like metaphor. However, thisprovision has limits. Metaphor refers to an absence through the relativelysimple juxtaposition of two unlike objects. Metaphor orients by pointing attwo things at once; these two referents can be easily listed as a single pointof bulleted text. However, not all knowledge is so economically referenced.If it isn’t on the PowerPoint, it probably isn’t importantA college student recalls this moment in class:3 ‘I am listening to a talk, andwhile there is no PowerPoint yet, I know there is going to be one [i.e. aPowerPoint presentation]. The equipment is set up, and the presenter wasfiddling with it as I came in. I feel impatient for him to start it’ (November2004). This student is impatient for the presenter to fire up PowerPoint