From the Editor-in-Chief

TEaChIng... hIgh-TECh or Low-TECh? Perhaps the most pervasive technology used in the college classroom is presentation software, such as PowerPoint or Keynote. I remember receiving photocopies of lecture notes when I was in college (I won’t say how many years ago), and my college-aged son tells me that at least 50 percent of his professors (at the most amazing college you’ve never heard of) use presentation software in their classrooms. I suspect it would shock many of our academic readers to learn that my husband rarely uses presentation charts in his teaching. He’s not exactly a fan of the pervasive use of presentation software in the classroom, and he explains why in his blog, “Why I Don’t Use PowerPoint for Teaching.”1 I won’t go into his reasoning here (because although presentation software might be pervasive, it isn’t pervasive in our sense of the meaning), but I do wonder whether he missed another problem with using presentations to teach: what if using presentations in teaching is comparable to taking photos to remember a vacation? As noted in my last “From the Editor in Chief” column,2 where I discussed NPR’s “Bored and Brilliant” series, it turns out that taking photos might impact your ability to remember what you see.3 So, does using pre-prepared lecture notes provided in the form of presentation charts affect our ability to remember the broader meaning of the lecture or to engage in the conversation? If so, perhaps there’s more value in taking your own notes—in the process of taking the spoken and visual information in, processing it, and summarizing it into a note in your own handwriting. It’s certainly something to consider.