PowerPoint: New High Score!

PowerPoint has certainly made presentations easier to make. But all the clip art and crazy animated effects tend to distract people from thinking about getting their message across.

Colin Price at the University of Worcester, UK, has a solution. He embeds PowerPoint presentations into the 3D shoot'em up Unreal Tournament. Truly, Price's Unreal PowerPoint is learning through play.

He says that sidesteps the way PowerPoint reduces complex webs of understanding into simple, linear - and artificial - narratives.

"The educator can deposit pre-prepared PPT slides onto the walls of a room, or onto objects within that room," says Price in a paper on the idea. He wants to teachers to explore ideas more literally, by wandering around them in the game environment.

It sounds like a great idea, although I do wonder how rapidly a lecturer could throw together one of Price's "Unreal PowerPoint" presentations.

Price also doesn't tackle one of the features of PowerPoint presentations its detractors love to hate the most - bullet points. Ed Tufte, professor of political science at Yale has written books against PowerPoint. He says that "bullet points make us look stupid."

Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points, agrees. "The core purpose of communication is to cohere: to coalesce fragments of information back together into a single understanding," says Atkinson, going on to point out that bullet points do the opposite. "They fragment understanding into little pieces."

It's difficult not to agree when confronted with the following example. Many political commentators agree that Barack Obama's oratorial skills could make the difference in the US Presidential race later this year.

Peter Abilla over at shmula.com took one of Obama's most popular speeches and turned it into a typical PowerPoint presentation, replete with bullet points. You can compare the two below and draw your own conclusions.

Colin Barras, online technology reporter