I'ma go all infographic on you!

OK, so I've written about PowerPoint before (check here and here, for examples), essentially about the possibility that it represents a necessary communications evil. It's ubiquitous; there ain't no escaping it.

Then, one day, my tiny little world-view got all blowed apart (in a great way) by Edward Tufte, which I kind of wrote about here. The Tufte symposium I attended was pretty great on a variety of levels, and one of the many fascinating anecdotes he shared with the attendees was about the U.S. Military's use of PowerPoint.

Basically, he said that they over use it and - perhaps more significantly - depend on it to somehow simultaneously dumb-down and over-produce the presentation of complex data. If you're interested, you can buy a Tufte essay on it here. Tufte also has plenty of posts about PPT on his quasi-blog, including one about Microsoft's CEO hating PPT and an essay excerpt which takes the stance that bad PPT presentations are not merely the fault of the presenter.

Anywho, I was really interested to see a post on Gizmodo yesterday about the military's dumb use of PPT. Gizmodo's post points to a New York Times article, which is where the ridiculous graphic above comes from, that provides a more in-depth look at why PPT just isn't appropriate for any some data. Interesting food for thought (with which most business people will probably disagree).

Back from the dead?

[Blink, blink] Is that sunlight? Ow, it stings. Maybe I should just go back into my office and grade some more. No! I have to be brave. I have to go out and engage the world again. I have to. I have to! Plus, it's the end of the semester, so grading is just about done. Take that, My Job! Back into the Waking World I go!

Yes, it's the end of the semester, and while I absolutely love teaching, I have to admit - and I think many (most? all?) of my colleagues out there would agree - that the tedium of grading can be a monster burden. At the very least, it can eat up a LOT of time, which gets us to the point: I haven't been posting much here this semester. I think maybe I assigned too many papers or something. gonna have to go back and review those syllabi...

However, I'm teaching Professional Writing technologies again next semester - with a complete overhaul, btw, focusing on hands-on rhetorical theory application to create rhetoric projects. Think cool software/hardware: Photoshop and GIMP, HTML and CSS coding using DreamWeaver and KompoZer, social media, etc. The point is that I haven't been contributing much useful information to this blog this semester, but that's changes starting now. Well, a minute ago. Whatever; you know what I mean.