Marine Corp General says PowerPoint Makes Us Stupid

The slide above has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control.

So much of e-learning today has gone the way of PowerPoint...literally and figuratively. "As easy as PowerPoint" is the specific, or implied, promise of many e-learning products. And since this page-turning mentality is just a presentation tool to begin with, not a learning tool, not much learning takes place.

By contrast, the x-learning approach from w/ is a learning by exploring and practicing approach. Learning the way we have naturally learned since the time we began to crawl. You can read a lot about that in our other blog posts, so for now, just enjoy the exerpt of the Times article, below...

According to the New Your Times, "Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

'PowerPoint makes us stupid,' Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

'It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.' "

 You can read the full article here.