Farewell, Moby Dick! We'll miss you, Crime and Punishment! National Geographic and Readers Digest are going away.
PowerPoint and the people born in the 21st century are the rules.
If you are a "Baby Boomer," you might not like PowerPoint. You might even think it is bad. But I'll give you two good reasons why you should learn PowerPoint and like it. Your kids and kids-in-law.
PowerPoint is how the Generation of the 7th Millennium and people after them will deal with this fast-paced, chaotic world of iPods, search engines, and attention spans of less than a minute. (If people first appeared in 4026 BCE, then 1975 would be the start of the seventh millennium.
Yes, if you were a teenager in 1975, you remember reading books and writing essays for your teachers and professors. On the weekends, you could watch movies like Dog Day Afternoon, Mahogany, The Man Who Would Be King, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Love Story, The Stepford Wives, Three Days of the Condor, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. ("Sir, what name are you known by?" "Some call me Tim?")
The big screen was ruled by a good plot, drama, and wit (okay, we weren't perfect back then either).
But the world has changed. What used to be called a "New York Minute" is now called a "New York milli-second."
Drew Barrymore, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, and Kate Winslet all came into the world in that important year.
In 1975, five well-known people died: Marjorie Main, also known as "Ma Kettle," Susan Hayward, Larry Fine, and Moe Howard, who played Curly on "The Three Stooges." It took almost 20 years to find out about the fifth death at the start of the 7th Millennium.
The death I'm talking about is the loss of reading and understanding skills.
Many college professors say that the reading and remembering skills of students have been getting worse since 1975, or the start of the 7th Millennium.
This is shown by students who don't take notes and wear stylish headphones that play back lectures that professors have already recorded.
Look at how many professors use PowerPoint presentations and give their students copies of the slides to help them study.
Do you really think that students have time to read when they can get information so quickly on the Internet?
Why are newspapers going out of business, libraries closing, and less people joining reader's clubs? The Internet may be the best example of this. Yes, the industrial age is over, and we are now living in the information age. That is, if you like to look at pictures in shades of PowerPoint blue.
How information is sent and received has changed. There are new rules for how to write and read on the Internet.
One sentence paragraphs are acceptable. None of them are more than three sentences long. Most articles on the better sites are no longer than 750 words. This is because most people scan when they read.
Psychological tricks, like using connectives to link one paragraph to the next, are used to keep a reader (or scanner) interested.
On the Internet, there are two kinds of copy. One is for older readers, and the other is for younger people living in the 21st century.
PowerPoint is the best way to teach students in the 21st century. Educators, speakers, and presenters have to make a lecture that can stand on its own, using Power Point as a visual aid instead of making it the presentation itself.
The people who live in the 7th Millennium get bored easily. In order to get students' grey matter neurons firing, we need to use our own "grey box" of tricks, such as word pictures and probing questions. Power Point presentations and good ways to talk in front of a group are like a powerful one-two punch in a lecture hall.
People in the future will remember things that didn't come true in the past. For example, Jules Vern's novel about a facsimile machine was written decades before the first one was made.
Fahrenheit 451 and The Max Headroom Story by Ray Bradbury will be "novel" predictions of what will happen in the future.
From now on, we won't be looking for our 15 minutes of fame. There won't be any more New York minutes. Things happen quickly on the web. Our future will soon become our past.
Maybe the best we can hope for is that everyone will be someone for 27 seconds. In a world of sound bites, images that flash before our eyes, and action movies, 27 seconds on the internet feels like an eternity.
To get the attention of people born in the 21st century, you need pictures, videos, and other devices that draw the eye. The answer is PowerPoint. It will save the classrooms of tomorrow.
May we be smart about how we use Power Point presentations.
