[Blog post based on my response to LDHEN list server]
I was fascinated to read about student boredom in David Hardman’s blog post . He said “New research by Sandi Mann and Andrew Robinson has found that boredom during classes may be a regular experience for most university students, and one which is exacerbated in lectures by the use of PowerPoint presentations.”.
My institutional access didn’t get me past the abstract of the source article but I was intrigued by the idea that”the personality trait Boredom Proneness was the most important factor moderating the experience of boredom”.
Posters to the LDHEN list highlighted student responses to small group classes and misuse of Powerpoint raising (at least) two issues:
1. Student responses to ‘interaction’ and their engagement
Interactivity is quite a flat word for the very uneven distribution of communication that can take place between students and teachers:
* Lots of students mailing teacher with little response
* teacher broadcasting exhortations/ information/ etc. to students with little response
* teacher interacting with very small subset of student group
It’s a challenge to make small group interactions ‘count’ - and very relevant to me about to commence a Y1 module for 450 students with limited f2f interaction - all suggestions welcome!!
2. Powerpoint
The suggestion that Powerpoint causes boredom always puzzles me as Powerpoint is no more a deterministic tool for communication than the telephone is. Would you compare a phone call from your loved one with one from someone trying to sell you double glazing? Powerpoint can be bullet points read by the presenter, or a wrap around for multimedia jewels and a departure point for the eloquence of the presenter.
Lastly - let’s deconstruct ‘boredom’ - how do students self-report it ? Does it mean (possibly productive) discomfort? A response to an uninspiring event? Or a response to a shallow learning activity?
4 responses so far ↓
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2 Emma // Sep 22, 2009 at 8:05 am
I fully agree with the point you make re. Powerpoint in itself not being boring, but the use of it can be.
There is also the fact that increasingly Powerpoint has the reputation of being boring, thus few have good expectations of it. (Much like the kid who’s naughty in reception class being labelled from then on as the trouble maker)
The other issue - and I suspect in some classes it’s both - are the students bored because they’re completely overwhelmed - or because they already know (or think they know) the material. [And, of course, the hardest thing of all to teach is something that the learner thinks they know...]
3 Emma // Sep 24, 2009 at 6:51 am
Another thought struck me recently. I’ve just been watching students give presentations. Some were very good, many weren’t, though; they were making classic errors (mostly, too much text per slide, few images, talking to the slides/reading notes)
I wonder what that says about the way powerpoint has been used in lectures …
Have they just learnt what they consider to be good (or standard!) practice in Higher Ed?
4 Frances Bell // Sep 29, 2009 at 10:18 pm
I have notice promising changes in practice in the use of Powerpoints. Many people now include informal citations in slides and a References/ Resources section in the last slide. There is a growth in use of videos/ images.
Of course, students will also experience “Death by Powerpoint”. I think we need to be confident about our own material and publish it, perhaps Slideshare.net so that other can attribute it and critique it.
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