About this Blogsphere:

This blogsphere attempts to capture, catalog and share resources relating to visual perception of information. It is about a world mostly dealing with Physical (Touch, Taste, See/Sight, Smell and Hear) and sometimes Metaphysical (and that is none-of-the-above category). Physical, for instance, touch (e.g., feel, felt, found), look and visualization, is here with an attempt to combine verbal, vocal and visual--to synchronously see, hear, share and do much more. Interestingly, in order to visualize one does not need special skills, competencies, etc. It is all about common sense, especially with human visualizations. In short, "information is in the eye of the beholder." Continue reading much more all-ado-about this Blogosphere

Akbani is a Cutchi Memon family name.

April 09, 2007

Powerpoint bad for brains - Menace of slideware

7th April is the World Health Day. And, comes a health related alert--affecting business and their use of PowerPoint, in relation to human capability to visualize, store and retrieve information.

By John Oates → 4th April 2007, Register, UK
"Anyone who's been a victim of "death by Powerpoint" - that glazed and distant feeling that overwhelms you when some sales droid starts their presentation - will be reassured by Aussie researchers who've discovered biological reasons for the feeling.

Humans just don't like absorbing information verbally and visually at the same time -one or the other is fine but not both simultaneously." ...

"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind & decreases your ability to understand what is being presented." ....

There's more from the Sydney Morning Herald here, or there's an abstract of Sweller's work (pdf) here.
Professor John Sweller is not the first to question the overarching power of Powerpoint. Edward Tufte is a professor emeritus at Yale and an information and interface design expert. His 2003 book The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within makes similar claims.® continue reading
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1 comment:

Nimmy said...

Thanks for leaving this link on my Blog, MT! Appreciate it and shall keep this in mind whenever I preapre a PPT henceforth! ;)(have provided a detailed response to your comment in my blog-post)

11:00 PM

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