Whether intentional or not Dr. Pastore appeared to disregard the Redundancy Principle against repetition with words and text and was narrating the written parts of his PowerPoint. He was also quite light on the images, and so was not taking advantage of Dual coding as well as he could have been. He did make an interesting point, though. He said that when asked in surveys, students preferred to have all three types of information coding available, both audible, written and illustrative. I’m guessing that this is for studying purposes on the part of students and thus might force an instructor’s hand in the matter.

It might be a good idea, then, to remember to keep the written information in a PowerPoint to a minimum (i.e., labels or short phrases relating to images) if the presentation is going to involve a fair amount of speaking. In a professional or academic setting, the impact of a particular PowerPoint might be very important and so should take advantage of as many of these principles as possible.

I realize that I have both broken and upheld some of the principles spoken of by Dr. Pastore. I have been guilty of reading text from a slide and I have been careful to not read text from a slide! It can be a function of what sort of group I’m in or what kind of material we are presenting, or even how much time we have.

Here is a silly video I made to show some sort of facility with Screencastify, just a short video of me playing solitaire (I know, not much imagination), hope it’s not too boring for you, although it is mercifully short.

Oh, and there’s a picture of me killing Darth Vader in Las Vegas. So Fun!