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* Center for Technology in Learning SRI
International Menlo Park, CA 94025 and
Department of Microbial and Molecular
Bioscience College of Arts and Sciences and Bioinformatics and Computational
Biology School of Computational Sciences George Mason University Fairfax, VA
22030
jwillett{at}gmu.edu
Points of View (POV) addresses issues faced within life science education. Cell Biology Education has launched the POV feature to present two or more opinions published in tandem on a common topic. We consider POVs to be "Op-Ed" pieces designed to stimulate thought and dialog on significant educational issues. Each author has the opportunity to revise a POV after reading drafts of the other POVs. In this issue, we ask the question, "Is PowerPoint the best instructional medium to use in your class?" Everyone seems to have an opinion on Microsoft, but the intellectual merits of using PowerPoint (or similar software) is a growing question as states and institutions put more and more money into information technology and distance learning. Four POVs are presented: 1) David Keefe and James Willett provide their case why PowerPoint is an ideal teaching software. Keefe is an educational researcher at the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. Willett is a professor at George Mason University in the Departments of Microbial and Molecular Bioscience; as well as Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. 2) Kim McDonald highlights the causes of PowerPointlessness, a term which indicates the frequent use of PowerPoint as a crutch rather than a tool. She is a Bioscience Educator at the Shodor Education Foundation, Inc. 3) Diana Voss asks readers if PowerPoint is really necessary to present the material effectively or not. Voss is a Instructional Computing Support Specialist at SUNY Stony Brook. 4) Cynthia Lanius takes a light-hearted approach to ask whether PowerPoint is a technological improvement or just a change of pace for teacher and student presentations. Lanius is a Technology Integration Specialist in the Sinton (Texas) Independent School District. The authors span the range of teaching experiences and settings from which they bring different points of view to the debate. Readers are encouraged to participate in the online discussion forum hosted by CBE at www.cellbioed.org/discussion/public/main.cfm and/or contact the authors directly.
The three most compelling arguments for the use of PowerPoint in the classroom are its suitability as a powerful and easily learned authoring system for course material; its ubiquitous availability to students, courtesy of the free Microsoft PowerPoint viewer; and its capability of coexisting with an overall course management environment (in our case, WebCT). In a course in molecular bioscience, PowerPoint also provides a means of mapping and directing the course of a classroom discussion on a topic, rather than just a means of presenting the materials.
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WHEN DOES POWERPOINT COME INTO PLAY? |
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 TOP WHEN DOES POWERPOINT COME... REFERENCES |
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The PowerPoint "Master Slide" can serve as a template, providing consistent graphic appearance and text for all of the slides in the presentation. However the Master Slide can also contain any other object accepted by PowerPoint, including action settings that hyperlink to other slides, PowerPoint presentations, or (via URL [uniform resource locator]) any Web resource. Anything set onto the Master Slide becomes available on all of the slides in the presentation. Thus embedding a link to the class discussion forum in the Master Slide means that students can seamlessly bring up the discussion forum while they are reviewing the class material and raise questions or share observations with other class members and faculty. The material presented in class can be highly interactive, through the use of dynamic links to supporting information, which the professor can access during class discussions and students can access during follow-up study.
By definition, all textbooks are outdated compared to research literature. Therefore, faculty often supplement textbook information with more recent information, images, and movies. Faculty can embed video segments, charts, photographic images, and tables in PowerPoint slides; these can also be linked to source documents so that the slide is automatically updated whenever the source documents change. This is particularly useful when presenting the results of research experiments that will evolve as the course progresses.
PowerPoint is used by the professor in the Biochemical Systematics course primarily as a means of moving directly from class discussion on a particular point within the context of the subject of the moment to the relevant databases or visual materials that enhance access to an understanding of these materials. Figure 1 is an excerpt from a presentation on The Citric Acid Cycle, showing links to relevant databases. Access to electronic journals in the molecular biosciences at George Mason University makes it easy for the instructor to focus on current research articles pertinent to the class subject under discussion as a core element of the lecture. Thus, PowerPoint serves more as a means of mapping and directing the flow of a classroom discussion on a topic than as a means of presenting the materials themselves. As molecular bioscience becomes ever more complex in both its depth and breadth, discussions of current studies of the cellular and subcellular processes that provide and drive cellular function become more revealing of the molecular structures and mechanisms involved. In so doing, molecular representations, pathway presentations, gene regulatory networks, and signaling cascades are described and represented graphically to enable a better view of the process and facilitate understanding of the phenomenon involved.
Students are expected to work in small group projects and to develop a PowerPoint presentation on their project for presentation to the class. The PowerPoint presentations used by the instructors serve as models for student projects in terms of providing guides on how to organize material. Observing how the professor makes use of the material conveys an understanding of how to connect the student project to the wealth of relevant information available on the Internet. The instructional model is an example of situated learning, a modern master-apprentice technique where the instructor models the behaviors expected of the student (Brown et al., 1989; Lave and Wenger, 1991).
The students produce an electronic portfolio at the completion of their projects, which includes the PowerPoint presentations. The presentations aid in faculty assessment of the student projects and give the students a useful vehicle for reporting on their graduate work in conference presentations or providing feedback to their employers.
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REFERENCES |
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TOPWHEN DOES POWERPOINT COME...REFERENCES |
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Dede, C. (1996). Emerging technologies and distributed learning. Am. J. Distance Educ. 10(2),4 -36.
Dede, C., Whitehouse, P., and Brown-L'Bay, T. (2002). Designing and studying learning experiences that use multiple interactive media to bridge distance and time. In: Current Perspectives on Applied Information Technologies, ed. C. Vrasidas and G. Glass (Volume1 : Distance Education). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.
Lave, J., and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
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