I've often wondered why lectures seem to send me to sleep. Either my mind wanders onto topics such as what housework needs doing, what I'd like to eat when I get out of the damn lecture, or what kind of underwear the lecturer is wearing, or I just start to nod off, and practically have to prop my eyelids open.
Up until now I've blamed the air conditioning, but it seems that perhaps PowerPoint is at least partly to blame for my compulsive snoozing:
Pioneered at the University of NSW, the research shows the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time.
[...]The findings show there are limits on the brain's capacity to process and retain information in short-term memory.
John Sweller, from the university's faculty of education, developed the "cognitive load theory".
"The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster," Professor Sweller said. "It should be ditched."
"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."
1 comment:
Interesting idea about powerpoint putting you to sleep. I used to sleep in many lectures too. It began to feel like a compulsive habit after a while. Come to think of it, they were always the lectures where you could print out the lecture slides in advance and not only read the slides along with the lecturer but also know what was coming in advance so you could read ahead. Overall it made me devalue the information just because it was presented in such a brain-atrophying way.
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