The Visualization Gap

http://www.nmc.org/blog/the-visualization-gap/

The bigger problem, however, is our mental limitations in both teaching and thinking visually. Most classes that “teach” PowerPoint gloss over the narrative changes that it imposes on us through its transition from a linear textual narrative to a nonlinear visual one. They also fail to examine the information transfer capacities of various media. PowerPoint is software that complements a performance and often fails as a container for information. It needs to be augmented by more persistent visual and textual media. I’ve worked around this by creating websites as a mechanism to gloss my presentation; provide background linkages; and to create a persistent, living complement to what happens live. Slideshare fails to do this because it only gives you half of the presentation, the visual part, which may or may not stand on its own. Part of visual literacy is understanding how visual media complements other media, such as audio and text.

Finally, we need to start embedding design thinking into our processes. Design thinking is, by its very nature, closely tied to the visual.

More on presentation design and tools in this blog:

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=presentation&submit=Search