Renewed hope for better PowerPoint

Tom Kuhlmann's excellent Rapid e-Learning Blog attempts to capture What everybody ought to know about PowerPoint in one posting, and makes a good start. I agree fundamentally with Tom that PowerPoint is not an evil - it is a highly versatile tool that is more often than not used very poorly. Much as some of us like to blame all the world's ills on Microsoft, they are not responsible for all those mind-numbing presentations that we all have to endure. We all are - we accept endless bullet point slides as an inevitability, as a fact-of-life. We don't have the courage to break the mould. To avoid repeating myself, I really must refer to you to one of my earliest posts The Emperor's New Slide Show and to a previous rant on this subject Don't blame PowerPoint.

Tom suggests plenty of ways of breaking the mould, starting with the ditching of the bullet point template. In the demo contained in his post, he shows how PowerPoint can be used to run a branching scenario (taken, I am proud to say, from the script for the 30-minute masters) and how a PowerPoint-based rapid e-learning module can be integrated with collaborative tools such as polls, surveys, wikis, etc. Keep at it Tom, because as I stated in a previous post, Good examples beat theorising any day.