John Schwartz in the New York Times: The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide, a discussion of the PowerPoint culture. The problem isn’t the tool, it’s the presenters. In college, I attended scads of boring lectures with bad overhead slides. PowerPoint has just made creating bad presentations accessible to everyone. One trend that I really do find disturbing is the increasing use of PowerPoint at all levels of education. The idea that students in junior high are writing reports in PowerPoint makes me a bit ill. That said, taking PowerPoint away wouldn’t solve anything. You’d just go to meetings and listen to boring presentations that included even worse visual aids than the awful PowerPoint slides that we put up with these days.

Update: Don Box has some tips on giving a technical presentation.