"Powerpoint is Evil"

Wow! Tufte was really reaching when he entitled his article, "Powerpoint is Evil." His assertions are based entirely on opinion and are purely subjective. I attended a leadership conference on this past weekend and found the use of powerpoint extremely effective an engaging. To write off the entire tool as evil is rather silly and immature. The users have more to do with a single presentations effectiveness rather than the tool itself. Tufte goes on to say, "Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something." I disagree with this overarching generalization and believe that powerpoint has been an effective tool in the use of summarizing, interpreting and evaluating literature. Students must select pertinent information to place on slides which uses higher order thinking skills. I totally disagree with Tufte's opinion and am curious as to the "real" reason he believes that powerpoint is evil!