Lecture FAIL
Sep 8th, 2008 by Butter
I’m going to bitch again about misuse of technology in the classroom. In one of my classes today we were dismissed a few minutes after arriving because the prof couldn’t get the desktop PC that projects the Powerpoint slides to boot. This despite the fact that almost all of the students had printouts of the presentation sitting in front of them, and the classroom has a perfectly good blackboard, and the professor possesses a larynx. And, for that matter, the fact that a few students probably had laptops with them with Powerpoint that could have been plugged into the projection system.
I had a film class canceled once for a similar reason, which I can almost forgive, what with the presentation being the point of that class (although the prof’s lack of preparedness or skill with the required equipment I can’t). But for lack of outline slides is a stretch. Fortunatley, most of my profs haven’t been so Eloi, and anyway, I’ve noticed that I learn and remember better in classes where the professor eschews slides entirely and writes on the board or on an overhead instead.
I think that PowerPoint in the classroom can be a good, useful thing — if done right. My geology professor, for example, used PP in his lectures to illustrate geographical formations, photos, illustrations showing how water flows, small animations showing plate tectonics, etc. It clarified concepts for us that he otherwise would have had a difficult time explaining or drawing.
On the other hand, I had a history professor who just used it to list bullet points which he would then read to us, as well as hand out a copy of the PP presentation as a study guide. It didn’t really help enhance our note-taking skills, teaching us to distill out the important facts and points of the lecture, because we knew we would just get it at the end of the chapter.
In your case, it sounds kinda silly that your professor canceled class , since you all could have just read along in your handouts. Maybe he was just trying to find an excuse to shove off early.