People tied up by PPT
In September this year, Dennis Austin, the inventor of PPT, passed away in the United States.
Zhang Cheng had just started his junior year when he saw the news. "After the introductory class for a week, there were seven or eight more classroom presentations." This means that seven or eight more PPTs need to be produced in the coming semester. And every classroom presentation is like "a sleepless night battling wits and courage with PPT."
Dong Jing, an urban white-collar worker, also experienced the same battle of wits and courage. When she worked in an advertising company, "it was the norm to roll out PPTs. She would produce dozens of pages of plans a week, often revising them late into the night."
"The world has been suffering from PPT for a long time." For urban white-collar workers and college students, this is a tool that makes people love and hate it.
PPT, whose full name is "PowerPoint", has been released on the Windows operating system in 1990. The presentation method with pictures and texts has reduced the audience's understanding threshold compared to pure text logical arguments and formula calculations. However, the abuse of tools such as PPT and mind maps in corporate culture is also becoming the epitome of increasingly formalism.
Is PPT still just a tool? Does it empower us, or will we be captured by it and embark on a path of self-destruction?
Ever since he entered college, for Zhu Li, the reminder that summer has passed is no longer the first cup of milk tea in autumn, but the first PPT in autumn.
"There have been class presentations since the second month of school, and I have been doing various PPTs since the beginning of school." Zhu Li sighed.
According to Zhu Yue's statistics, he needs to do at least 20 PPTs in one semester: classroom presentations in physics courses, group discussions in general philosophy courses, student work reports, mathematical modeling competitions, and even final assignments for some research courses. It must also be submitted in the form of PPT... Zhang Cheng, a junior at a university in Shanghai, gave a figure that is close to the same. "If you do an internship outside during the semester, it will probably be several times higher."
His estimate is not unreasonable. Xiaoyu, who majored in economics at another university, has been interning in consulting, securities and other industries since his freshman year, and has been working in PPT for more than two years.
"We call this drawing PPT, and we usually have it every week. At peak times, there may be 2-3 copies a week." She said, "If it is for internal communication, it only needs to be typeset simply to ensure the most basic format structure. That’s it. But if you’re showing it to customers or higher-level management, you need to pay special attention to the art,” Xiaoyu said.
Dong Jing, who once worked in the advertising industry, knows this well. At that time, she was responsible for social media related work in a second-party advertising company, and many project proposals involved commercial displays. "At this time, the PPT must be very cool. From the arrangement and logic of the display to the overall style and tone, there are certain requirements, which is equivalent to packaging the entire project and playing the role of facade." Dong Jing said, "At that time, in order to catch up with the PPT "It's normal to stay up late revising drafts."
There are also teachers who feel trapped by PPT. According to statistics from the higher education think tank Michaels, a typical young teacher makes more than a thousand pages of PPT every year. Some university teachers even wrote in their year-end summary, "216 lessons in class and 3,649 pages of PPT."
Now, “during the teacher training stage, PPT has become an indispensable part of teaching.” said young teacher He Lu.
In fact, the controversy caused by PPT is global. One of the most representative critics is former Apple CEO Steve Jobs. In a 2011 biography, he argued against people viewing PowerPoint presentations as a substitute for thinking and advocated confronting problems directly and having discussions. Jobs even banned the use of PPT within Apple.
Looking back on when PPT first appeared in teaching, Meng Yong said, “It provided new possibilities.”
Meng Yong works as a physics professor in a university. Decades ago, when computers were not yet widely available, students had to hand-write formulas on a large blackboard during class. If they needed to show complex calculation processes or models, they had to make special slides and prepare projectors. “It’s very troublesome and not easy to update.”
For him, the invention of PPT has greatly lowered the threshold of visual design. It is easy to operate, low in use cost, and easy to update in real time. It can also be shared with students as teaching reference, reducing the cost of communication between teachers and students, and completely rewriting the process of lesson preparation, Teaching paradigm.
He Lu also believes that the "sheet-like structural characteristics" of PPT enable it to serve as the skeleton of the curriculum and make teaching controllable and standardized. "After having an outline reference, it is clear at a glance what should be covered, how deeply it should be covered, what is necessary and what should be skipped." He Lu mainly teaches the course "Outline of Modern Chinese History". As an ideological and political course, the content, structure and teaching format of the course are relatively fixed and do not change much over time. "Unless there is a unified overhaul of the teaching materials, the courseware can basically continue to be used and will be more efficient."
Later, the school emphasized the need to move from teaching to learning, change teaching ideas, and promote student participation in the classroom. Many professional courses and general courses have adopted the practice of classroom presentations, setting aside classroom time for students to report on a topic, a paper or a book. When He Lu was in school, classroom presentations usually consisted of "talking on stage and listening in the audience."
But now in university classrooms, if you want to give a class presentation, PPT has become the default condition. "I have only just realized this 'default' relationship myself." He Lu said, "But it is reasonable. There is a PPT Afterwards, students will be able to have a clearer idea of what their speech ideas are, organize the content consciously and contextually, and control their time more rationally.”
However, when does a good tool slowly turn sour? He Lu recalled a "cat-and-mouse game" that happened between two classes he led because of PPT.
At the beginning of the semester, he issued identical presentation requirements to both classes. During the first presentation, the PPT used by Class A students was extremely crude, "almost just a whiteboard with black text", but the speech content was logically clear and the insights were unique. The group in Class B made their PPTs look like handicrafts. "The content of the report is unremarkable. When sorting out the context of historical events, the thinking is very messy, and the grasp of the material is also very low." He Lu said. But for the purpose of encouragement, he mentioned in his review, "This group's PPT was done very carefully."
What he didn't expect was that such a short comment would lead to differences in the subsequent classroom presentations of the two classes. The students in Class B obviously spent extra effort on the art. “Later, during class, I re-emphasized that the content of the class presentation was the most important, which was a timely stop loss,” he recalled.
"Students will guess what kind of things the teacher likes and focus on those things that can bring them high scores. If the teacher does not reveal obvious preferences, students will try it out like sonar and then make adjustments based on evidence." He Lu said.
Zhang Cheng realized something was wrong when he was preparing for his first classroom presentation. He felt quite stressed that time. "I stayed up for two long nights and was very afraid of making mistakes." However, when the presentation officially started, he found that few students in the audience listened to the lecture. Only when the "click-click" sound of chalk hitting the blackboard was heard, Only then will some people raise their heads. He suddenly realized that whether it was PPT or the classroom presentation itself, it was all just for the sake of grades and for the teacher to listen to. "Present for class presentation, and do PPT for presentation."
However, some people are still obsessed with "rolling" classroom presentations and "rolling" PPT: they make the slides extravagantly beautiful, and some even spend money to hire OEMs to improve the aesthetics. "Actually, it's just gold and jade on the outside, with bland content and even unclear logic. It's just to attract the teacher's attention in exchange for high scores." Zhu Yue commented.
"People are all visual animals. A well-organized and well-designed PPT can not only 'attract the eyes', but also shows that enough time and energy have been invested. Under similar conditions, customers will definitely favor you more." Gu Yue said . She works in a public institution in Shanghai. In 2013, the unit ushered in the opening ceremony of a major project that needed to be displayed to the public. "At that time, the PPT was prepared for more than half a month: how to do the art, how to improve the animation effects, etc., and revised more than a dozen drafts."
"How well the PPT is done, at a small level, is evidence of the level of investment. At a large level, it is the appearance of a unit, reflecting the aesthetics of a unit and a brand." Gu Yue said.
As Party B, Dong Jing will also deliberately make the PPT cool to attract Party A's attention. "Because we often don't know what Party A's evaluation standards are, I feel that beauty is a very important influencing mechanism, and it is inevitable to focus on this, even if it is only a negligible added value."
One of the consequences of PPT going bad is PPT dependence.
"I'm just reading PPT." Zhang Cheng said bluntly when talking about a certain professional course this semester. "The teacher came to class with a USB flash drive. There was no lecture notes or blackboard writing. From class to get out of class, except for occasionally answering students' questions, Just read according to the PPT.”
PPT lowers the threshold for making teaching ginseng and also lays down the landmines of inertia. Zhang Cheng found that in many of the courses he took, the PPTs often remained unchanged for several years, the charts still used data from a long time ago, and even typos left over from history had not been corrected. "Both sides are fooling around."
When teachers rely heavily on PPT in teaching, students in the audience will also become dependent. Due to the clear organization and limited text, the PPT provided by the teacher is more concise and clear compared to the dozens of pages of papers and textbooks, which is a good way to take shortcuts. "This is also scary. In a subject like history, the real connotation lies in the details of the text." He Lu said.
The fact that some courseware remains unchanged over the years seems to be contradictory to the "volume" PPT mentioned above, but the actual root cause is similar. He Lu believes that this is closely related to the evaluation mechanism.
Whether it is a student who is meticulous in his pursuit of high scores, or a "Party B" company who is trying to attract customers with great imagination, the reason why they are being led by the nose is simply in the hope of getting positive feedback from "Party A". And such feedback involves future achievements, promotions, and profits. As the presentation party, PPT producers have to rack their brains and spend enough effort where they can.
For teachers of ideological and political courses, the assessment is not very flexible, and the most important part of the required lesson preparation materials is PPT, so there is not enough incentive to invest extra time in polishing the lecture notes.
"PPT is neutral as a technology and can be neutral as a tool, but if its positioning itself is not clear and the things involved are part of the assessment, it will become a bottomless pit," Zhang Cheng said.
In recent years, some universities have made regulations against "PPT dependence". The "Yan'an University Multimedia Teaching Management System" mentions that for new teachers, the school advocates and encourages the use of traditional teaching methods. Teachers who have been teaching for less than two years are not allowed to use multimedia teaching in principle. In addition, it also clarifies students' expectations for the quality of multimedia teaching. Evaluation will play an important role. For teachers whose teaching effect or courseware quality is poor in the evaluation of classroom teaching effect, their qualifications to use multimedia teaching within one year will be cancelled.
The "Basic Specifications for Multimedia Teaching of Xinjiang Agricultural University" stipulates that it is not allowed to project only the title or teaching material catalog on the screen, without supplementary blackboard writing, and without the assistance of other courseware content; it is also not allowed to illegally list large paragraphs of text on the courseware page. Pages with more than 200 words accounting for more than 10% of the total courseware pages are considered unqualified courseware. Courseware without a single picture, table or animation in each lecture is considered unqualified courseware, etc.
As the school's academic affairs leader, Meng Yong has been in charge of teacher training in recent years. In response to these practices, Meng Yong believes that it is unreasonable to write off the letter. "The significance of PPT as a teaching reference material is certain. The focus is not on banning it. The focus is on how to encourage teachers to use it benignly through the assessment mechanism."
"The diversification of classroom forms must be supported by rubrics and evaluation systems." Meng Yong said, "The purpose of students' presentation is to promote learning backwards. If the scoring is not clear, this phenomenon of reversal of priorities may occur. . We hope that teachers can evaluate based on the essence of the content, so as to play a positive guiding role.”
Recently, Dong Jing left "Party B" company and came to a foreign-funded enterprise to be responsible for strategic planning related work. The role of PPT in her work also changed accordingly. "Now, as Party A, I often listen to PPT reports from research companies or financial institutions." But the difference from before is that "the company I am currently working for pays more attention to the content displayed, and PPT has returned to its original role as an auxiliary tool. As long as it can be clear and Just be accurate, not just aesthetically pleasing.”
Zhang Cheng and Zhu Yue found that many students around them gradually began to use templates to make PPT, because they found that if only considering grading, in the assessment standards of most courses, classroom presentations are often a less differentiated part. "So no matter how good the PPT is, the profit is not high. It is better to adopt a paradigm and follow the same pattern, leaving more time to do meaningful things." Zhang Cheng said.
Dennis Austin, the father of PPT, once said, "PPT is like a printing press, it also prints all kinds of garbage."
The invention of PPT has greatly lowered the threshold of visual design, allowing everyone who can operate a keyboard and mouse to make their own presentation tools in a targeted manner. To a certain extent, PPT has broken the original monopoly of visual design skills by a few people and returned it to the hands of the majority.
But the crux of the discussions surrounding PPT in today's society does not lie in its tool properties.
When PPT is placed in an asymmetrical power structure and appears as one of the evaluation items, it no longer exists just as a tool, but is given an additional layer of signaling value: whether it is beautiful or not directly determines the main content. The extent to which it can be penetrated into "Party A" also reflects the professionalism of "Party B" itself, which indirectly determines whether the presenter can "stand out" among competitors.
The cat-and-mouse game played out between Party A and Party B, teachers and students in enterprises and academic settings is, to some extent, also caused by the flexibility of the evaluation mechanism.
In enterprises, employees rack their brains to beautify PPTs. The fundamental reason is that the competition, selection and evaluation mechanisms are not clear, so they can only use marketing thinking to carve out their appearance. But can the contested outcome itself be uncontroversial? Can the evaluation and selection mechanism be truly objective through quantification?
In a context where the number of teachers is insufficient and uneven, and large class teaching has not yet become mainstream, how much energy do teachers have to burst this beautiful bubble one by one and see the true inner nature?
Even if there is a sophisticated scoring mechanism to solve the above problems, how to convince "Party B" who have repeatedly hit the wall in the evaluation mechanism that things in the form of PPT are only secondary and will not become a consideration?
As long as any of the above problems are not resolved, the signal value of PPT beyond its tool attributes has the potential to be infinitely amplified.
In the usually asymmetric power structure that hosts PPT, any of the above problems are difficult to solve. The "cat-and-mouse game" will inevitably happen again and again.
