A silent villain lurks in our classrooms and boardrooms, draining motivation and replacing it with boredom. Its name is PowerPoint, and Matthias Poehm, a public-speaking trainer from Switzerland, has mounted a campaign to eradicate it.
Mr. Poehm has formed a new political organization, the Anti-PowerPoint Party, or APPP, that seeks to put a referendum on the Swiss ballot that would ban PowerPoint presentations. He says the problem is costing his country $2.5-billion and the rest of Europe an estimated $160-billion annually in lost productivity. Mr. Poehm hopes to ignite a global campaign against not just PowerPoint but against all presentation software.
“In some countries students and pupils are punished with a lower mark, if they give a presentation without PowerPoint,” his fledgling party asserts on its Web site (which prominently features advertisements for Mr. Poehm’s book, The PowerPoint Fallacy). “In the future, those in companies, congresses, universities, schools, who want to renounce PowerPoint should not have to justify themselves any longer.”
Mr. Poehm is not the first to point out PowerPoint’s kryptonite-like qualities. A study reported in 2009 by psychology researchers at the University of Central Lancashire found that 59 percent of college students find their lectures boring at least half of the time. PowerPoint was named as the key culprit.
And last year The New York Times reported Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s reaction to a particularly confusing PowerPoint diagram depicting U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan: “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”
But unlike most of the critics, Mr. Poehm has a secret weapon in mind to replace PowerPoint’s hypnotic allure: Flip charts.
“Compared to PowerPoint, the use of flip charts creates a multiple effect for the audience in terms of impact, excitement, and comprehensibility,” APPP’s Web site says.
Flip charts: Feel the surge of electricity! Generate positive student evaluations! Visualizzzzzz ...
