(Sam Heathcote -- The Beacon)
By Christina Nelson, Guest Commentary
We've all been there. The moment one of our fellow classmates whips out her USB drive and starts to load up a PowerPoint presentation, we go into shutdown mode. Someone murmurs, "You should turn out the lights," and suddenly a college classroom is reminiscent of naptime in preschool.
Why do we do this to each other? We're assigned that dreaded oral presentation, we psyche ourselves up for five to fifteen minutes of nerves, and we're shocked when our audience begins to drift off to sleep.
Our professors argue that some sort of visual aid keeps the class interested — and is probably worth 20 percent of your grade for the speech — but why does that visual aid have to be in the form of a drab PowerPoint presentation coupled with dimmed lights? A sociologist would say something about norms and conformity, but I think we've just become lazy. Before mastering PowerPoint, we drew and glued pictures to giant sheets of butcher paper and poster board. We let our creativity flow for the sake of that 20 percent, we took our time perfecting every detail, and we were proud of our creations. I cannot for the life of me remember making a PowerPoint presentation that made me feel proud; I can scarcely remember anything about them, to be honest.
We're not solely to blame, however. The choices that the University of Portland makes regarding services to help students create visual aids are affecting us as well. For example, did you know that we can no longer purchase butcher paper anywhere on campus? I know this to be true — I spent the better part of an hour getting the runaround from half a dozen campus departments, none of which could supply me with the paper. I had to drive across town to a specialty paper store to get some. Why does this hideously expensive institution deny us access to such a cheap, simple supply? The answer given by campus faculty and staff was an apathetic shoulder shrug.
The ease of creation afforded us by technology has allowed creativity to fall by the wayside. For many of us, this part of a presentation assignment is our only opportunity to craft something unique and creative with our hands as well as our minds. Still, a vast majority of us choose the easy route, whipping up a PowerPoint presentation in a matter of minutes. The result is typically either boring beyond compare, as mentioned previously, or painfully distracting from what the speaker is saying.
Let's face it: nothing about PowerPoint presentations is fun. We dread the lectures from professors who rely heavily on them, we yawn through slide after slide on presentation days, and while we breeze quickly through the process of creating a Powerpoint presentation, it's more akin to the chore of flossing one's teeth than to finger painting.
I say, let's finger paint. Let's smell up our dorms with Sharpies and rubber cement. Let's bust out the glitter glue and construction paper and gel pens. Let's break free of the two-dimensional by bringing back the diorama. Let's keep each other awake during class. Moreover, let's make something we're proud of; let's make something memorable.
Christina Nelson is a senior philosophy major and can be contacted at nelsonc12@up.edu.
