Against the tyranny of PowerPoint

 

This longer blog summarizes the arguments I presented in
Gabriel, Y. 2008. Essai: Against the tyranny of PowerPoint - Technology-in-use and technology abuse. Organization Studies, 29(2): 255-276.

In the four years since the original piece was published, the tyranny of PowerPoint (in its stultifying, predictable and lazy uses) seems to me to be even more oppressive and a re-thinking of its uses and abuses is urgently needed.

PowerPoint is a technology that has quietly, surreptitiously even, made itself indispensable. Like e-mail about ten years earlier, PowerPoint initially gave the appearance of accomplishing what earlier technologies did (overhead transparencies, slides, chalk and blackboard) only more efficiently, more stylishly. In this sense, it could be seen as an instance of straight-forward automation. Yet, just as e-mail redefined the nature of organizational communication, PowerPoint is having some far-reaching consequences. In business and government, lengthy reports are supplanted by print-outs of transparencies while, in higher education, PowerPoint has become the sine-qua-non of the lecture. Thus, the nature of ‘presentation’, ‘lecture’ and possibly of ‘learning’ itself are being irreversibly altered, some indeed may say ‘reinvented’.

A brief overview of the development of PowerPoint

PowerPoint developed from an earlier piece of software, initially created for the Apple Macintosh II, called Presenter. It was purchased on the year of its release by Microsoft for a relatively small sum, rebranded and developed as a simple-to-use instrument mainly for business presentations. In the later part of the 1990s it became part of the suite of programmes that made up Microsoft Office and in a short period of time established itself as the indispensable medium for business presentations. The concurrent development of email and the Internet ensured that PowerPoint slides could be easily communicated to wide audiences, packing a lot of information into what seemed like an aesthetically pleasing and synoptic style. Instead of having to plough through lengthy reports, busy businesspeople could quickly skim through a few transparencies and absorb the essential features of a case or an argument. Very rapidly, with the addition of animations, sound effects and graphics, PowerPoint presentations also become corporate style statements – expressing corporate values, such as ‘modernity’, innovativeness, and so forth.

The incursion of PowerPoint in education was almost as rapid as it was in business, even if the reasons behind it were not identical. Its uses can be viewed as symptomatic of some long-term changes in teaching and learning technologies. These coincide with a changing range of demands on academics and increasingly consumerist attitudes of many learners.

Publishers quickly realized the possibility of profits from this market and considerately offered ready-made slides, initially on stencils and later on line and on CD-ROMS, for lecturers to incorporate into their teaching programmes. Many lecturers, to their delight, discovered that teaching scores and student satisfaction improved with the use of PowerPoint.

Gradually audiences, both in lectures and in academic conferences, have come to expect and even demand PowerPoint as an indispensable feature of presentations. In my experience, students in business, management and the social sciences, once they had tasted the delights of PowerPoint, were unwilling to give them up. In spite of wide cultural differences, diverse learning styles and other preferences, these students, in a very short period of time came to view PowerPoint as a totally indispensable accoutrement to the lecture.

Some criticisms

One may caricature the new form of lecture as one of students engaged in one of the favourite pass-times of our age, watching pictures and absorbing largely subliminal messages. As consumers of educational packages, they extended their experience of being consumers of shows and spectacles, on and off TV. This can all be seen as part of the widely debated commercialization of higher education which turns students into customers and universities into McUniversities (Gabriel, 2005; Parker & Jary, 1995). Education then could be seen as coming close to entertainment (some call it ‘infotainment’) with bite-size morsels of information that do not strain or test their powers of reasoning or comprehension beyond supplying enough material for some largely ritual testing to take place. Thus, PowerPoint can reduce the students’ critical awareness, naturalize knowledge into seemingly indisputable bullet-points and bolster the authority of the lecturer whom it surreptitiously transforms into a salesperson (see also Sturdy & Gabriel, 2000). At the same time, it substantially limit a lecturer’s ability to deviate from a preconceived lecture plan, to improvise or to develop a new line of thinking in the course of a lecture. Like a set of rails fixed on the ground, PowerPoint slides lock the thinking process along a single linear path, blocking impromptu variations and digressions, in short improvisation and exploration.

But criticisms of PowerPoint run even deeper. In the last few years, a lively debate has grown around its uses, mostly conducted on web-sites, prompted by a stinging critique by Edward Tufte, a Yale professor of information design (Tufte, 2003a, c). Tufte charged PowerPoint with degrading the quality of communication, stupefying and boring audiences and debasing everything it touches. Critics have held PowerPoint responsible not only for spiritual and cognitive debasement but for material disasters too (Felder & Brent, 2005). Tufte (2003b), for instance,  argued that the Columbia disaster might have been averted had the crucial information regarding the foam which critically damaged the shuttle’s tiles not been contained in a confusing PowerPoint slide with 10 bullet points at six levels. Tufte’s argument is that the vital piece of information that would have alerted NASA to the damage sustained by the shuttle was drowned by information overload, noise and absence of context which were the result of a PowerPoint mindset.

… And some defenses

Tufte’s lampooning of PowerPoint (“Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely”) has earned him some notoriety and fame. Yet, similar charges can after all be raised against virtually any form of information technology. Typewriters destroyed the skills of calligraphy, word-processors destroyed the skill of producing well-turned phrases, and the Internet has allowed every type of uncensored and unauthorised text to claim an audience. Is one to judge a new technology purely by is negative consequences? Defenders of PowerPoint have pointed out that many of the shortcomings of PowerPoint result from poor usage rather than the technology itself and claim that one cannot blame PowerPoint for every problem of our educational system. Some educationists have produced evidence from schools indicating that PowerPoint helps pupils absorb information and that it enhances their concentration and motivation to learn. Such defenses are essentially utilitarian – PowerPoint, may not excite the students or stimulate their thirst for knowledge, but it makes the job of teachers in the classroom easier in keeping the attention of the children, helping maintain their interest and assimilate the material.

But PowerPoint has also been defended on artistic and aesthetic grounds. Artist and musician David Byrne:

Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent. The pieces became like short films: Some were sweet, some were scary, and some were mysterioso. I discovered that even without text, I could make works that were "about" something, something beyond themselves, and that they could even have emotional resonance. What had I stumbled upon? Surely some techie or computer artist was already using this dumb program as an artistic medium. I couldn't really have this territory all to myself - or could I? (Wired Magazine, Issue 11.09,  September 2003)

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1.html

By using PowerPoint as a vehicle of expression, displaying collages, unpredictable juxtapositions of objects, or subversions of conventional images, Byrne demonstrated that this most ‘straight’ and conventional business technology could hold artistic and subversive possibilities. He showed that users display considerable ingenuity in creating new uses and new meanings for technological artefacts, discovering new contexts for them and, even, revealing subversive and ironic potentials that had never figured in the plan of the designers. Uses of this technology then could be viewed as discontinuous and episodic rather than standardised and routine, active and creative rather than passive and habitual.

Uses of PowerPoint in education

 

The ubiquity of PowerPoint makes it easy to confirm that the competence of users varies. We all have experience of presenters going ritually through their slides, determined to exhaust their stock in spite of the exasperation and tedium of their audiences. We also have experience of presenters who dazzle us with impressive graphics, leaving us in doubt as to whether it was all froth and no substance. Slides that seemed full of life and meaning in the lecture theatre turn out to be dull or dead when surveyed on paper the day after.

If competence varies across users, so too do the repertoires of applications to which PowerPoint is put. Some users rely on helpful or stimulating illustrations to liven up their argument, others may use bullet points to suggest an argument’s basic structure, yet others may employ slides as a kind of hyper-text offering a commentary on their oral presentation. Styles in the use of PowerPoint vary – the number of slides and the speed at which they succeed each other, the nature and extent of the animations etc. Above all, the content of the slides and its relation to the oral presentation vary, reflecting each user’s style and competence and the nature of the communication. The content of slides also varies, but much of it involves a. bullet points lists, b. visual illustrations (schematic illustrations or photographic and other images), and c. statistical data, often in pie charts or other such forms (or a combination thereof). These categories, of course, overlap – lists can be presented as graphs and statistics as images (e.g. pie charts).

Lists

Lists of bullet points are the main format for presenting PowerPoint text, something reflected in all standard templates provided by the manufacturers. Lists have been the target of much criticism (see for example Feynman, 2001). Lists imply certain assumptions that are not  always met. For instance, many people (and most students) confronting a list will assume that it is exhaustive,  that the items on it are co-equivalent (no list can be made of apples, dinosaurs and average rainfall in London) and that they are mutually exclusive (one cannot have in a list  of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Lower East Side). In reality, few lists meet these requirements, and yet they block thinking into precisely areas of overlap or items that are absent from the list. Furthermore, lists obscure contexts and assume an unquestioned authority that conceals weaknesses in analysis, argument and structure. Thus, bullet points confer a false authority on dubious knowledge, making it appear unavoidable and ‘natural’; they appear to “speak objective truths, undisputed wisdom and uncontested assumptions.” (Karreman & Strannegard, 2004, p. 9) This is supported by an experiment I tried out in my own practice as a lecturer, by randomly rearranging the bullet points on slides and then re-arranging the slides in a presentation. To my surprise, it took minimum skill of improvisation to extemporize around the new spurious order and I doubt that anyone in the audience noticed. Such is the rhetorical power of a list of bullet points that huge inconsistencies and other flaws can easily be obscured.

This false authority of bullet point lists makes them a potentially disastrous device in education, dulling the critical faculties of students and offering bad lecturers a comfortable mantle of security. Yet, not all lists are bad lists and not all audiences respond to them in a dull uncritical manner. Lists have had their defenders. Feyerabend (1987) made a case that (properly constructed) lists are ‘basic ingredients of common sense’ and indeed early forms of theory. Thus, Aristotle made extensive use of lists in developing his theories and some of his well-known works amount to little more than highly detailed (and carefully constructed) lists which constituted essentially his lecture notes.

But lists have other uses, beyond being potential building blocks of theory. One of these is to help us structure our thinking, even if poorly constructed lists act as substitutes for structure. As punctuation points in a presentation, they can enhance understanding and communicate reasoning structure from the presenter to the audience. Furthermore, lists have mnemonic and aesthetic qualities too. A well-defined list, in its economy, completeness and originality, can afford much pleasure. A list that assumes a convenient acronymic quality (such as the  four P’s of marketing) installs itself easily in the memory. All in all then, in spite of serious potential pitfalls, lists can be useful cognitive and communicative devices.

Images

In spite of the importance of lists, it seems to me that the true blessing and maybe the curse too of PowerPoint is its ability to display images. By projecting pictures, the presenter can transport his or her audience to distant places, replacing the orderly setting of the lecture theatre with visions of exotic lands and unusual sights. Ours is truly a society of visual representations and PowerPoint can turn the modest, old-fashioned lecture into a real show, stimulating to the eye, entertaining and exciting. When presented with simultaneous audio and visual stimuli, our minds remain alert, seeking to establish the relation between sound and image, presented with countless instantaneous puzzles to prevent boredom from setting in. Sometimes, the image may reinforce the sound or vice versa. At other times, image and sound can work against each other or may produce entirely novel effects.

Like lists, pictures can have detrimental effects on learning. Image can come to the rescue of poor argument, flawed structure and unreliable analysis. It also wrecks style, obliterating the finer nuances of language for the immediate bombardment of the senses. Like watching television, watching a sequence of vaguely attractive and undemanding images on a screen in a darkened room may induce a quasi-hypnotic state in the viewer dulling his/her critical spirit and inquiring intelligence.

Yes, like bullet points lists, images can be very useful devices in generating and disseminating knowledge. In some areas, like architecture, knowledge is vitally captured in visual representations which enable professionals to communicate with each other quickly and effectively. Much design work is carried out through images, sketches and drawings which embody and express ideas and innovations. Photographs, drawings, sketches, graphs and computer printouts are all images, the commonest of which are hybrids of two or more such elements. For certain types of knowledge transfer, such as explaining the functioning of the human heart or the construction of a new building, image is indispensable.

Another type of image that features in PowerPoint presentations is the diagram, such as the schematic representation of material in 2x2 matrices, Venn diagrams and the like. These can relate large amounts of information in a relatively economical way, although as in the case of lists, they may conceal many of the simplifying assumptions upon which they rest. Yet, like lists, diagrams can help both structure our thinking process and simplify mind-numbing complexity into something that we can understand and relate to. Diagrams can also afford some aesthetic pleasure in conveying information economically, wittily and elegantly. As with lists, therefore, while images can prove counter-productive in many respects they also open up new possibilities of creative thinking, communication and learning. Like well-constructed lists, well-thought out, imaginative diagrams can be the basis on which theory and even entire domains of knowledge, like business strategy, are based. In such domains, the visual representation can be as important an instrument of learning as the highly detailed argument (Porter, 1985, 1991).

Statistics

Statistics in PowerPoint often feature as graphs, pie charts and the like. These have been branded ‘chartjunk’ by Tufte (2003c) and admittedly they lack the rich informative detail and precise beauty of numbers. Yet, they can reveal relative proportions in a quick manner and maybe avert some of the misunderstandings that arise from miscounting the number of zeroes at the end of  numbers. Graphs, pie charts and other graphic representations of figures can be generate misleading impressions, but so too can numerical data.

More generally, it does not seem that charts have undermined the emphasis on measuring and quantification, in what Boyle (2000) calls the ‘tyranny of numbers’ and its social effect, the audit society (Power, 1997); if anything, the graphical representation of statistics have enhanced the rhetorical force of numbers, by encouraging the construction of quasi-scientific league-tables, rankings and so forth. In short, PowerPoint neither undermines the power of numbers and statistics, nor should it be viewed as responsible for bolstering it. As with the use of images, so too in the presentation of statistics, PowerPoint can present information in an economical, evocative and even aesthetic manner, although, of course it does not always do so. It does not seem to me that PowerPoint by itself and when properly used substantially degrades the quality of statistical information conveyed.

All in all, it appears that PowerPoint encourages a certain linear form of reasoning that dislikes digression and has limited flexibility. Complex arguments can become simplified into bullet points and lists, fancy illustrations can conceal inadequate analysis or can create misleading impressions. Pictures and images can easily turn a learning process into one of entertainment.  Yet, some of the criticisms levelled at PowerPoint may be exaggerated or missing the point. In the first instance, some of the criticisms of PowerPoint are clearly aimed at poor uses of the technology – badly constructed lists, poorly presented statistics and facile illustrations. Secondly, some critics appear to be comparing a PowerPoint presentation (and sometimes a flawed one at that) with an ‘ideal lecture situation’, where an inspired lecturer improvises, discovers and illuminates. In reality, many routine lectures involve little improvisation, discovery or illumination and many of the lecturer’s ‘inspired digressions’ may be experienced by students as confusing, tedious and overcomplicating issues. By contrast, a routine PowerPoint presentation may offer the kind of structure, simplification and support for argument through illustration that learners favour. Undoubtedly it restrains and limits the lecturer’s freedom but this may not be unwelcome to confused and anxious students. When skilfully used, PowerPoint can offer certain advantages to teacher and learner, including a useful tool for summarizing key points with mnemonic cues and lively visual supports that can embed learning. PowerPoint then offers some easy solutions to problems of presentation, which may not always be the optimal solutions, but they support communication and learning.

Reinventing the lecture – from Authoritative text to multi-media performance

Having offered a more equivocal assessment of some of the costs and benefits of PowerPoint technology, I would now like to examine how this technology is affecting the nature of a lecture and, more generally, classroom learning. In a much quoted argument put forward at the time when computers were beginning to make a large impact in classrooms and offices, Zuboff (1988) contrasted two modes of implementing new technologies at the workplace. The first was termed ‘automation’ – a situation where the machine leaves the fundamental process unchanged but performs tasks previously carried out by humans or simpler machines. This generally leads to marginal gains in productivity, staff redundancies and deskilling for the remaining workers. By contrast, Zuboff proposed a different mode of implementing new technology, for which she offered the not altogether helpful term ‘informate’, whereby fundamental tasks are rethought and reconfigured in the light of new technology. By ‘informating’ rather than automating tasks, some of the negative consequences of new technologies are avoided; instead of deskilling and alienating workers, new technologies can lead to a reskilling and, in some cases, enhanced autonomy and control in the workplace.

Like other types of technology, PowerPoint may be used to automate the lecturing process. Where an old-fashioned lecture may have employed a drawing on a blackboard to draw the relations between certain concepts, PowerPoint offers a colour diagram; where a traditional lecture may have used an anecdote or a joke to support an argument, a PowerPoint lecture may use a photograph or a cartoon to liven things up. Where a traditional lecturer may have turned his/her back to the audience in order to produce a more or less successful circle on a blackboard, PowerPoint enables a lecturer to produce perfect circles, without sacrificing eye contact. Such uses of the technology essentially simplify old tasks. My argument, however, is that the influence of PowerPoint goes far beyond this to reconfiguring the nature of lecturing into a multi-media, multi-skill performance rather than the delivery of a more or less polished spoken text. The audience, for its part, may then approach the lecture as a multi-faceted experience, lived in several dimensions, visual and audio, cognitive and emotional.

As a piece of technology-in-use, PowerPoint has very rapidly become an organizing template that shapes beliefs and actions in lecture theatres, boardrooms, conference halls and elsewhere. At the same time, it has become a means through which knowledge is constructed as an organizational resource, codified, negotiated, contested and embodied (Tsoukas, 1996). It seems to me that two factors conspire to encourage the metastructuring effected by PowerPoint, first, our society’s increasing emphasis on image and spectacle, and, relatedly, second, the new range of skills which emphasise multi-tasking, discontinuity, visual alertness and semiotic sensitivity as against patient and deep thinking, long periods of concentration and deference to the authority of a ‘text’.

In emphasizing the visual image, PowerPoint plays into our culture’s obsession with image, picture and spectacle. Numerous theorists have argued that spectacle has become the primary type of experience in late modernity, dominating almost every aspect of our public and private lives. Spectacle saturates public and private spaces, offering “the promise of new, overwhelming, mind-boggling or spine-chilling, but always exhilarating experience” (Bauman, 1997, p. 181).  If, as McLuhan noted, the printing press brought about the first victory of the visual over the aural/oral (McLuhan, 1962), the rise of television, spectacle and image accelerate the process.

But, image and spectacle do not invariably induce passivity and stupefaction. Appropriating images is far from a passive experience.  As consumers in a society of spectacle, we are frequently seduced by image. But we also learn to mistrust image, to question and probe it. We develop skills to read and decode, question and ignore, frame and unframed, combine, dismiss and ignore images (Gabriel & Lang, 2006). Visiting museums and art galleries, we learn to compare contrast, filter out, frame and focus on particular exhibits. Similar skills are used to engaging with the diverse spectacles we observe in our streets, our shopping malls, our theatres and theme parks.

Not only have we become experts at appropriating images in different ways, but many of our memories assume visual forms. Retention becomes linked to image. As Susan Sontag put it “the memory museum is now mostly a visual one” (2004) – remembering has come to signify having a mental image of an event or of a phenomenon. An event captured on camera becomes instantly more memorable than one of which no visual record is left. If learning requires memory, most people today would more readily remember a well-chosen image than a well-argued case. By reconfiguring the lecture as a multi-media performance enabled by PowerPoint rather than seeking to use PowerPoint to automate tasks previously performed by slides, chalk and board and so forth, the visual sensitivities and skills of our age can be put to the service of learning and education.

The risk of argument closure that PowerPoint carries (Karreman et al., 2004) can also be overcome as creative users of PowerPoint discover that they can use it to generate and sustain discontinuity. Discontinuity is a crucial element in many types of learning. Its importance for stimulating curiosity cannot be overestimated. Discontinuity between knowledge and experience, between different types of sensory stimuli, between emotion and cognition, between what is known and what is desired – all of these fuel a desire to learn and to explore. Discontinuity represents a boundary that invites transgression, a journey to be made, an unknown to be experienced. It also implies an anxiety to be conquered. In some ways, the very predictability and linearity of PowerPoint makes it a fascinating instrument to subvert by taking a variety of risks. There are different performance risks that can be taken (e.g. risqué slides, collages, discontinuities, omissions and disruptions); there are fascinating and troubling juxtapositions of narrative and imagery; there are startling possibilities of irony and self-parody where the spoken text points in one direction and the projected picture in a different one. In such ways, the lecture can be reconfigured from listening carefully to a single voice of authority to an experience of seeking to decode a multiplicity of signals, some audio, some visual, which sometimes reinforce each other, sometimes are out of step with each other and sometimes interact with each other to produce novel effects.

This proposed reconfiguration of the lecture as a multi-media performance does not only build on our culture’s obsession with spectacle but also on a wide range of skills that are emerging in a new generation of pupils groomed on watching television, playing computer games and decoding advertisements while at the same time talking on their mobile phones and preparing their homework. These skills that have replaced the older skills of learning that involved patience, concentration and application. By contrast, the skills of today involve speed, multi-tasking, short bursts of concentration and the ability to deal with constant interruptions.  The skills include (if I may be permitted proposing a list):

• filtering out much that is irrelevant noise and focusing on what creates a memorable emotional experience
• tolerating uncertainty, lack of plot and absence of closure
• coping with pluri-vocality, with ill-defined characters and ambiguous moral messages
• accepting experiences with ambiguous or opaque meanings, without closure
• enjoying puzzles without permanent solutions
• juxtaposing, comparing and criticising

For all our concerns regarding the suppression of critical spirit in learning, our culture is far from uncritical. On the contrary, as consumers we are accustomed to criticize constantly the products, services and experiences that we have and those we observe in others. Under an increasingly consumerist ethos in education, lecturers themselves become frequent objects of comparison and criticism by their students. In its early days, using PowerPoint at all may have been enough to impress students. As, however, they become exposed to different performances and different uses, they learn to discriminate, to compare and to creatively appropriate.

In conclusion

What I am proposing is that PowerPoint does not have to be viewed as a machine in the service of a strict regime of knowledge management as some of its critics have claimed (Alvesson & Karreman, 2001). Nor, in line with a naïve interpretation of McLuhan’s well-known aphorism, does PowerPoint always operate as a medium that tyrannically conveys a fixed set of messages (McLuhan, 1964). Instead, it can convey a multiplicity of messages, in a multiplicity of ways. In particular, it can be viewed as a resource which builds on our culture’s emphasis on image and related skills or decoding, multi-tasking, filtering and criticizing. Instead of automating existing features of the lecture, it can redefine the lecture as a multimedia experience, problematizing knowledge, posing questions, framing puzzles, creating discontinuities and stimulating a desire to learn. It can then make use of our culture’s predilection for multidimensional experiences, for texts with diverse and obscure meanings, for images that can be decoded in a variety of ways. In such circumstances, lecturers themselves, instead of being deskilled, rely on a new range of skills to make the best of the resource available to them. Instead of using PowerPoint in a routine, mechanical manner, they experiment with different possibilities and discover new potentials. In so doing, they can use PowerPoint just as sophisticated consumers use the things they buy, in ways that go beyond the designs of the designers, manufacturers or advertisers. They combine different components, they make unorthodox uses of specific items, they reframe and modify the things they use to meet their desires and express their individuality.

The term ‘paragramme’ has been proposed for flexible routines, around which users improvise, innovate and reconfigure (Gabriel, 2002) to create new and unique solutions, new and unique performances. In contrast to ‘programmatic’ users, who rely on closely following instructions and recipes, paragrammatic users are flexible, idiosyncratic, opportunistic and ad hoc. They enjoy ‘bricolage’ and tinkering (Lévi-Strauss, 1966; Weick, 1993) with the resources available to them, eschewing what is predictable and ‘programmed’. Paragrammatic users of PowerPoint may resort to lists and bullet points when the situation demands, they may show pictures when they present an interesting complement or counterpoint to the argument being made and may discard the technology altogether when they risk lapsing into predictable and mind-numbing routine. Instead of bemoaning the rigidity of the resource, they look for ways to make it pliable and surprising. In this way, they avoid falling into the tyranny of PowerPoint, as well as blaming PowerPoint for other more subtle forms of tyranny. PowerPoint becomes a creative resource, mastery and even virtuosity over which can be a feature of the user’s professional identity rather than a threat to it.

I would argue then that, like many forms of information technology (such as computers, email, and even the internet), PowerPoint in its early stages seemed to offer the convenience of doing old tasks in more efficient and more polished ways. It created exaggerated hopes (for some parties) and concerns (for others) that it would lead to tighter knowledge management, through codification, standardisation and closure. Overall, the conveniences afforded by PowerPoint were viewed as having a downside, that included deskilling, routinizing and standardizing. In line with a widely held Western anxiety, technology becomes the slave-turned-master imposing its tyranny on everything it touches. My contention is that many users of this technology have realized that this tyranny is not unavoidable and that, like other types of educational technology, when used in a creative and non-routine way, it can provide a learning and a teaching experience in line with the visual sensitivities and skills of our times.

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