LECTURE PREPARATION IS WORK. University Diaries finds a London Times column that reinforces her case against reliance on presentation software.

All PowerPointers, like all burqa-wearers, look alike. They are asleep to the world, inside their coma of conformity.

Go to the column. Presentation software makes it easier to teach to the test, and it enables the non-aggression pact between professors and students.

A dependency culture on teachers is created, facilitated by PowerPoint and its non-Microsoft equivalents Keynote and Impress. When these students arrive at university, many academics perpetuate the problem. A lack of planning and preparation for a teaching session means too many walk into a lecture with a memory stick of PowerPoint slides. They have not written a lecture. They have written PowerPoint slides. They think these two things are the same. They are not. We see similar problems in conferences. Researchers are meant to present scholarship to colleagues. Instead they project PowerPoint slides.

It recalls the Soviet Union: the professors pretend to profess, and the students pretend to learn.

Inexperienced teaching staff shortcut preparation and break the key mantra in the use of educational media. They read slides. When I was taught how to construct text-based supplementary materials, the rule was simple: if a teacher shows text, do not read it. Let visual literacies operate where they work best. Let auditory and oral literacies function where they are at their most efficient. Do not waste student time by reading what is before them on a screen. Less text is better text.

Think about the lectures, seminars and conferences you have attended in the past five years. Think about how many presenters used PowerPoint slides as notes for speaking. They either spent the entire session glued to the podium or looking back to the auditorium’s screen. Both systems perpetuated a single flaw: they read the text visible to the audience. Such an action is offensive to those who take the time to “listen” to a session.

This flaw in presentation and speaking leads to the final – and most serious – problem for our students. Such presenters have written their entire script on PowerPoint slides. Students recognised this strategy. Therefore, why should they attend a lecture or seminar when everything that is said is on the slides? That is not laziness on the part of a student. They are being logical. There is no benefit in attending the class.

The use of the technology, however, leads to problems further on, which is the principal point of the column.

When teachers confuse writing with PowerPointing and preparation with the construction of slides, it is no surprise that students also skip stages in reading, thinking and writing. This issue is not simply “about” PowerPoint. It combines with the use of low-level textbooks to create a learning experience of monotony, conformity and mediocrity.

Some of these tendencies are caused by the post-CNAA (Council for National Academic Awards) obsession with learning outcomes rather than learning. The desire for quality assurance rather than “quality” has manifested as ongoing mediocrity. When examining and moderating assignments and dissertations, I read bundles of papers that are unerringly the same. This is much more than the same teacher presenting a singular view to a class. The students have restated, and rarely reordered, the bullet points on lecture slides. When reviewing the teaching file, I match the PowerPoint presentation to paragraphs in the assignment. The students attained learning outcomes. Whether they actually learnt anything is debatable.

PowerPoint has not caused this problem. Its poor use is harming staff and students. It is making staff believe that they have prepared for a teaching session. It is making students think that they are taking notes, when they are simply copying slides prepared by someone else.

I see the British are making the same error U.S. higher education has, letting the theorists of the Colleges of Deaducation call the shots. But attaining learning outcomes is not the same thing as developing your jive detector, or becoming proficient at understanding a concept and communicating it.

That's what inspired the column: student paper drafts that lacked content.

Flaws with writing, drafting and editing are easy to address. But this year, a new problem emerged in the feedback sessions. Half the cohort demonstrated no flow between ideas. It was as if each paragraph was written in isolation. To diagnose the cause of this strange structure, I asked to see their notes from module readings. Each student pulled out notes from the lecture and seminar. I replied that they looked fine, but where were their engagements with the readings?

The first few paragraphs of the column are checklists for conducting research and drafting papers. I'll probably incorporate them into the senior paper class (yes, we're using the College of Deaducation language, capstone) I sometimes teach.