Farewell Crime and Punishment! Adios National Geographic and Reader's Digest! Good bye Moby Dick!
PowerPoint and the generation of 7th millennium rules.
You might be a "baby boomer," so PowerPoint probably won't appeal to you. Because it is possible that you will also think that it is bad. But let me give you two good examples to understand and appreciate PowerPoint. Like your children and grandchildren.
PowerPoint is the medium that the 7th millennium and beyond will encounter in this fast-paced, frenetic world of iPods, search engines and micro-minute attention spans. If humans came on the scene in the year 4026 BCE, 1975 would mark the beginning of the seventh millennium!
Yes, if you were a teenager at 75, you remember reading novels and writing essays for your teachers and professors. Over the weekend, you've seen Dog Day Afternoon, Mahogany, The Man Who Will Be King, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Love Story, The Stepford Wives, Three Days of the Condor, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail ("Sir, what name are you with? Are you known?" ... Reply? "Some people call me an organization?")
But times have evolved. What was then the "New York minute" is now the New York milli-second.
Big screen greats born in that remarkable year include Drew Barrymore, Kate Winslet, Charlize Theron, and Angelina Jolie.
In '75, there were five notable deaths - Susan Hayward, The Three Stooges Larry Fine, Marjorie Main and Moe Howard. At the time of the birth of the 7th millennium, the fifth death was not written anywhere for almost 20 years.
Many college professors trace a decline in student reading and retention to 1975, or the beginning of the 7th millennium.
This is revealed by students who take no notes, wearing stylish headsets that replay lectures recorded by professors.
Let us see how many professors use PowerPoint presentations today and give copies of slides to their students to use as a study guide.
Really do you think students have time to read while the internet presents information lightning fast?
Why are libraries shutting down, newspapers shutting down, and readers' club memberships falling? Perhaps the biggest reason is the Internet. Yes, the industrial age is overand the information age is alive and well. That is, if you like to see pictures in shades of PowerPoint blue.
Getting information from someone and giving information to someone has changed. And now the Internet has a whole new set of rules for writing and reading.
To engage a reader, psychological tricks such as connectives are used to connect one paragraph to another.
There are two types of medium on the Internet. One appeals to the traditional readership, the other to the new generation of the 7th millennium.
PowerPoint has become a medium for educating 7th millennium students. The challenge facing speakers, teachers, and presenters is to create a lecture that can be helpful on its own merits by using PowerPoint as a visual aid instead of making PowerPoint a presentation.
The 7th millennium generation gets bored easily. Using our own little gray box of tricks to stimulate students' gray matter neurons, use word illustrations and check questions to elevate thinking is a must. PowerPoint presentations combined with effective speaking strategies are a dynamic one-two punch in the lecture hall.
will remember non-predictions of the future and the past as was the case with the concept of a replicating machine several decades before the creation of Jules Verne's novel.
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and The Max Headroom Story will be 'novel' predictions of the future.
Moving on, we will no longer be looking for 15 minutes of fame. No more New York minutes anymore. On the Internet, things are now done in a matter of seconds. Our future will soon become our past.
Perhaps the best we can hope for, or do, is that everyone will be someone for 27 seconds. In a world of sound bites, images and action movies flashing before our eyes, the reality is that 27 seconds on the net is an eternity.
Drawings, images and attention-grabbing devices are needed to capture the attention of the 7th millennium generation. A good solution for which is powerPoint. This is the salvation of tomorrow's class delivery.
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