Wednesday, April 04, 2007

PowerPoint Bad for Learning?

I ran across this article about a study at the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia). The basic gist of the study is that people can only retain so much information in short term memory and when we split our attention between two sets of the same information, one spoken and one visual, we are less likely to retain either.
"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 and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."
I wonder if the problem isn't with PowerPoint itself but rather with the way that PowerPoint is used?