The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching out corrupts within // Edward R Tufte

Graphics Press 2006 31pp (2^nd ed.)
ISBN 0 9613921 6 9
US cover price $5.00 (paperback)

Exploring similar territory to The great presentation scandal, but more measured and persuasive. This issue matters for elearning because many perpetrators consider PowerPoint slides a model.

Tufte's reservations are well summarised in this quotation: “The PP slide format has probably the worst signal/noise ratio of any known method of communication on paper or the computer screen” (my emphasis).

His most chilling example is NASA’s faulty response - with fatal consequences - to the 2003 Columbia shuttle problem... largely because key information was presented only as PP. Peter Norvig’s Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint (right) makes similar points hilariously.

Trigger happy // Steven Poole

Fourth Estate 2000 254pp
ISBN 1 84115 120 3
UK cover price £12.00 (paperback)

Subtitled “The inner life of videogames”, this makes a persuasive case for taking games rather more seriously than most have to date. Great relevance to elearning because it gets to the heart of what motivates people to stay in an application for hours on end.

The great presentation scandal // John Townsend

Management Pocketbooks 1999 105pp
ISBN 1 870471 67 9
Price unknown (paperback)

Subtitled “Why so much time is wasted by so many speakers for so little return. How to fight the fraud and halt the hoax”, this mischievous little book is a delightful reminder that presentations should be about substance and visual aids should be visual... and should aid.

Electronic Performance Support Systems // Gloria Gery

Ziff Institute 1991 303pp
ISBN 0 9617968 1 2
UK price (in 1991) £27.95 (paperback)

The EPSS concept explained by the person who coined the phrase. 20 years on it’s encouraging that people who design computer systems now pay much more attention to making them self-explaining. And depressing that the once-great training profession has failed to rise to the challenge of sculpting the time, place and shape of its interventions to enable the job (rather than interrupt it).

Computers as Theater // Brenda Laurel

Addison-Wesley 1991 211pp
ISBN 0 201 51048 0
UK cover price (in 1991) £26.95 (hardback)

Classic call to action to “think of the computer not as a tool, but as a medium”. Still relevant 20 years on: we all too often see dumbed-down, media-poor elearning. Or, worse, media-heavy elearning where the media consume time and deliver nothing in return. UXD - user experience design - is now much more eminent in web design, but seems to be a closed book to many elearning perpetrators.

I suggest you skip the first two chapters, though.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information // Edward R Tufte

Graphics Press 1983 197pp
-USA hadn't adopted ISBN in those days-
UK cover price (current edition) £46.96 (hardback)

A wonderful, wonderful book still on sale as it approaches its 30^th birthday, and deservedly. Beautifully produced, sumptuously illustrated, cogently argued... a must-read for anybody who has to explain numbers and a should-read for anybody whose work or life is affected by numbers presented by others. That’ll be everybody, then.

A lot of Tufte’s ideas come together in Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813, a wonderful illustration that he brought to prominence more or less single-handedly via this book.

But there’s more than that. Much more. His next two books - Envisioning Information & Visual explanations - are fabulous. This one is better.