PowerPoint and the The Death of Reading

If you're a "Baby Boomer", KeyNote for Mac aficionados and PowerPoint will likely not appeal to you. Perhaps you will even feel it is evil. But I'll give you two good reasons you ought to understand and appreciate KeyNote and a Power Point presentation; your children and grandchildren.

There’s no better way to reach the listening and learning style of the under 30 crowd. Short attention spans, visual learning preference, little or no reading skills required, and short sound bites. The generation of the 7th Millennium rules!

Goodbye Moby Dick! Farewell Crime and Punishment! Adios National Geographic and Readers Digest! Public speakers pay heed. This could be your greatest audience challenge.

Space, the final frontier has been replaced with the place between our ears. Instead of engaging in mental enterprise, we are looking for the consolation prize. We live in a world that reasoning has been replaced with feeling. Reading has been replaced with visual stimulation.

PowerPoint and Keynote are the New Way

Keynote from Mac and PowerPoint are the way the Generation of the Seventh Millennium and beyond will cope in this fast-paced, frenetic world of iPods, search engines and micro-minute attention spans. (If man came on to the scene in the year 4026 B.C.E. according to the Bible, then 1975 A.D. would mark the beginning of the Seventh Millennium.)

Yes, if you were a teen in '75', you remember reading novels and composing essays for your teachers and professors. On the weekends, you caught movies like Dog Day Afternoon, Mahogany, The Man Who Would Be King, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Love Story, The Stepford Wives, Three Days of the Condor and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

A good plot, drama, and wit (ok, we weren’t perfect then either) ruled the big screen. The music our parents and grand parents loved to hate was poignant and meaningful. It was also music (having a harmony and melody) compared to the melodic noise of today.

But times have evolved. What was a "New York Minute" then is a New York milli-second today. Where we could have been famous for 15 minutes, now we can be famous 27 seconds into the future. Famous, that is, if we have the max headroom needed to be famous.

The big screen stars born in that notable year include Drew Barrymore, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, and Kate Winslet. There were also some notable deaths for those who grew up during those years.

In '75', there were five notable deaths -- Marjorie Main (Ma Kettle), Susan Hayward, and two of The Three Stooges, Larry Fine and Moe Howard. The fifth death, at the birth of the 7th Millennium, was not noted for almost 20 years until 1995.

The Death of Reading

The unnoticed death was the death of reading.

Many college professors trace the decline of student reading and retention to those born in 1975, the beginning of the 7th Millennium.

This is manifested by students who take no notes and wear stylish headsets that re-play lectures recorded on various recording devices.

Prior to 1975, students would at the least read Cliff Notes. In 2009, over 30 years after the death of reading, perhaps the last nail has been driven into the coffin of reading. No longer does a student need to Cliff Notes their way to an A.

Now all they need to do is Twiterature their way through literature. A sort of Cliff Notes for Cliff Notes. What will be next, a Readers Twitergest version of Readers Digest.

Look at the popularity of a Keynote or Power Point presentation with handout copies of the slides. They are the student's study guide, reading optional with lots of pictures.

By the way, think you do not know Keynote? If you saw Al Gore’s, “An Inconvenient Truth” then you saw a Keynote presentation in action.

Do you really think students have time to read in the lightning-quick fashion life goes on? Why do they text one another? They do not have the time for a normal conversation.

Why are newspapers folding, libraries closing and reader's club subscriptions falling? Perhaps the biggest indictment is the Internet. Yes, the industrial age has ended and the information age is alive and well. That is, if you like looking at pictures in shades of PowerPoint blue and Keynote special effects.

Delivering and receiving information has changed. There are a new set of rules for writing and reading on the web.

The Key to Educating

The key to educating 7th Millennium students is Keynote and PowerPoint.

The generation of the 7th Millennium becomes easily bored. Stimulating students' gray matter neurons requires using our own little gray box of tricks, using word illustrations and probing questions to instigate thinking.

Along with questions, not just Keynote and PowerPoint, but a whole new generation of ultimate Power Point and Keynote will evolve.

Psychological use of colors and attention capturing design presentations combined with effective speaking tactics are a dynamic one-two punch in the lecture hall.

The future will remember non-predictions of the past as was the case with Jules Vern’s novel conception of a facsimile machine several decades before its creation.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and The Max Headroom Story will be ‘novel’ predictions of the future. Off buttons for computers and TVs may just be enacted into law.

Moving forward, we will no longer look for 15 minutes of fame. No more New York minutes. On the web, things happen in seconds. Our future will soon become our past.

Everybody Will be Somebody For 27 Seconds

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that everybody will be somebody for 27 seconds. In a world of sound bites, images flashing before our eyes and action movies, the reality is that 27 seconds is an eternity on the net.

Capturing the attention of the mind of the generation of the 7th Millennium requires pictures, images, and attention-grabbing devices. PowerPoint is the solution. It is the salvation of tomorrow's classroom.

May we use our Power Point Presentation wisely and never forget, the true power point is the place between our ears.

Forget Plain Jane, use images that will help trigger memories in your PowerPoint or Keynote Templates for this generation. Keep the Right Brain busy with vivid pic's so that the Left Brain can process the info.

Show the template naked first
Then dress it with words
The change adds to the mental registration

The brain likes continuity so....
Templates need to maintain a theme

One sentence paragraphs are acceptable. None should be longer than three sentences.

To engage a reader (or scanner as the case may be), psychological tricks like connectives are used to tie one paragraph to the next.

The Key to Educating

The key to educating 7th Millennium students are PowerPoint and KeyNote. The challenge facing educators, speakers and presenters is creating a lecture that can stand on its own merit, utilizing PowerPoint as a visual aid rather than simply giving a power point presentation or demonstrating a keynote presentation.

Would you like more information...?

Go to Main Power Point Tutorial Directory

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Power Point Basics is a condensed version of the same information.

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