Interesting article in yesterday’s Washington Post:  PowerPoint: Killer App?.  Here is a sample of the antiPowerPoint theme:

Like all forms of torture, though, PowerPoint degrades its practitioners as well as its victims. Yes, boring slides were plentiful in the pre-PowerPoint era — remember the overhead projector? Yes, it can help the intellectually inept organize their thoughts. But the seductive availability of PowerPoint and the built-in drive to reduce all subjects to a series of short-handed bullet points eliminates nuances and enables, even encourages, the absence of serious thinking. Really, why think at all when the auto-content wizard can do it for you?

The article uses two great examples of "the soul-sapping essence of PowerPoint":

• One parody: PowerPoint Presentation of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
• One (unfortunately) real:  PowerPoint Presentation of the Columbia Space Shuttle, presented to NASA senior managers in January 2003 while Columbia was in the air and NASA was weighing the risk posed by tile damage on the shuttle wings

In our recent article, Taking Back the Law School Classroom: Using Technology to Foster Active Student Learning, 54 J. Legal Educ. 551 (2004), Rafael Gely and I chronicle the criticism of the use of PowerPoint in law school teaching by Ian Ayres, Doug Leslie, and others.  We explain how we use old and new technologies to increase student engagement in the law school classroom (previously blogged here).