habits of mind, and classroom culture. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 38(4), 389-411. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220270600579141

In lecture halls, in secondary school classrooms, during training workshops, and at research conferences, PowerPoint is becoming a preferred method of communicating, presenting, and sharing knowledge. Questions have been raised about the implications of the use of this new medium for knowledge dissemination. It is suggested PowerPoint supports a cognitive and pedagogical style inconsistent with both the development of higher analytical thinking skills and the acquisition of rich narrative and interpretive understanding. This paper examines how PowerPoint invites and seduces educators to reshape knowledge in particular ways, and subsequently how this knowledge is presented to students in the classroom. The particular forms of knowing, relating, and presenting with PowerPoint are decided in part by teacher habituation to the software tool's default patterns, but also by the very nature of the presentation medium itself. Keywords: computer uses in education; lecture method; Microsoft PowerPoint; multimedia materials; phenomenology; visual aids. A medium is a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture's politics, social organization, and habitual ways of thinking (Postman 2000: 10). Of late, PowerPoint 1 is suffering from more than a few detractors. On the heels of Tufte (2003a) declaring PowerPoint 'evil', the Columbia Accident Investigation Board partially implicates NASA's ubiquitous use of PowerPoint in the shuttle tragedy (Langewiesche 2003). And, despite musician David Byrne's (2003) much touted foray into PowerPoint 'art', some sitting in the audience would agree PowerPoint presentations often leave something to be desired. As a medium for teaching and learning, PowerPoint increasingly finds its way to school classrooms, lecture halls, and conference podiums. However, while some questions are being raised by media scholars, PowerPoint usage among educators seems to be relatively unreflective and taken for granted. Much of the educational literature on PowerPoint has focused on 'howto' advice and occasional exemplar uses in the classroom. Survey data suggest students find PowerPoint a useful cognitive tool and the provided electronic files and slide printouts helpful for revie