Today I gave a presentation on the Rise of Democracy in England. I was to present the research I’ve done all semester long accumulated into a research paper. The presentation was to be less than 10 minutes because between two class periods of 75 minutes each, 7 people had to present. Well, most of the presentations were under 10 minutes, but what took most of the time was getting the equipment setup to do what the presenters wanted. The problem wasn’t that the equipment (a computer hooked up to a projector) was incapable, it was that the students were incompetent. Most of the students presenting were unable to even open their PowerPoint presentations on the computer to which the projector was connected! These are people my age! All of them are in the 18-24 age range. They’ve grown up with computers!
While I don’t expect that everyone know how to operate a computer with grace and sophistication, I do expect that people my age should at least know how to open a file! And maybe, just maybe — this might be pushing it a bit — even be able to go into slideshow mode in PowerPoint. I know that it might be kind of difficult for some people, but frankly, I’ve been able to do it since I was about 8 when PowerPoint itself wasn’t very mature yet. I could also open a file by then! I don’t know how these people made it through high school — or even middle school. I firmly recall having to do many PowerPoint presentations during my years in middle school and high school. Come to think of it, I remember one I did in elementary school as well! (Although it was in our computer class…)
Today’s class was pushed to almost 3 hours (from the original 75 minutes) and most of it was spent trying to explain to the technologically handicapped presenting how to get their PowerPoint presentations open and in presentation mode. I might be a bit bitter. It was quite frustrating.
