In this issue: PRESENTATIONS AND THE POWERPOINT PROBLEM

Naeff report their research on students ’ responses to both lecture con-tent and instructor when that instructor uses PowerPoint slides to pre-sent course material. Their students demonstrated some ambivalence toward the software. However, many writers on the subject of PowerPoint are less sanguine about its use and more critical of its misuse. The most recent salvo in the skirmish over presentation software comes from Edward Tufte (2003), guru of graphic design, who has recently published a monograph critiquing the “cognitive style ” of PowerPoint. With its predesigned templates and auto-content features, Tufte charges, PowerPoint encourages a “foreshortening of evidence and thought, ” and “a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content ” (p. 4). Because that soft-ware is “entirely presenter-oriented, and not content-oriented, not audience-oriented, ” Tufte charges that it leads users to “a preoccupation with for-mat ” rather than ideas, a phenomenon he terms PowerPoint “Phluff” (p. 4). And he reinforces the comment with a visual of the jarred marsh-mallow goo immediately to the right of his paragraph. Author Ian Parker (2001), writing for The New Yorker, is similarly con-cerned about the effect of PowerPoint on thinking. He charges that the software “edits ideas, ” and that its template structure, with heading