Joint Event from School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London and IEEE United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland (UKRI) Section

Beyond the tyranny of PowerPoint: On the effects of PowerPoint on Higher Education By Yiannis Gabriel (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Date		Thursday 8th November 2007
Time		12:30pm ~ 1:45pm 
Venue	IN244, Large Board Room, International Building, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK
Maps		https://www.rhul.ac.uk/Shared/Maps/ (#15 on campus plan)
ABSTRACT		Over the past five years, PowerPoint has emerged as a powerful piece of communication technology, having profound consequences on presentations (business and educational), classroom communication and, possibly, on the nature of lecturing itself. An analysis of the ways in which PowerPoint is used offers considerable insights into, first, the nature of educational technologies and their organizational implementations, second, the effect of these technologies on the construction and dissemination of organizational knowledge, and, third, on the qualities and skills of a society of spectacle, where a great deal of organizational knowledge assumes the form of visual representations. Using illustrations from his personal experience, the author examines some uses to which the software is put and some of its potential short-comings. These include the parcelling of knowledge into bullet-points, reliance on visual aids to support weak analysis and the forced linearity of argumentation that limits improvisation, digression and inventiveness. The author, however, argues that PowerPoint can be used more creatively, to build on our culture’s emphasis on spectacle and image and related multi-tasking skills that lecturers and students develop. 

BIOGRAPHY		 Yiannis Gabriel is Professor of Organizational Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. Earlier he held posts at Imperial College and the University of Bath.  Yiannis has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London, where he also carried out post-graduate studies in industrial sociology. He has a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Yiannis is well known for his work into organizational storytelling and narratives, leadership, management learning, the culture and politics of contemporary consumption and organizational psychoanalysis.
ORGANISERS	(1) School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, (2) IEEE UKRI Engineering Management and Professional Communications Joint Chapter (EMPC).
CONTACT		Dr. Anne Craven, Tel: 01784 44 3813, Email: ems-ukri@ieee.org
			Web: https://ewh.ieee.org/r8/ukri/em_pc/

Registration is not required.
Free admission, All are welcome !