Professional collaboration last Friday.

I sat through three or four PowerPoint sessions, several hours to ponder a) under what circumstances should one person address a large, captive, immobile, and mostly mute audience and b) how to do it well, if one is so called.

Half a legal pad later and I’ve got kind of a detailed post to share with you all this week (one which probably deserves some criticism). Before I drop it, though, I’ve gotta set up this one concept which I’ve termed “multimedia dissonance,” a name which feels appropriate only ’cause I haven’t seen it explicitly defined elsewhere.

Multimedia Dissonance Cognitive Overload

It’s what happens when you’re in front of an audience reading (or reciting) any amount of text that exists in the same presentation in another medium.

For Example

Like when you’re reading the same text that PowerPoint’s projecting over your shoulder.

This isn’t about aesthetics or bullet points. It doesn’t matter if the text is laid out nicely and poorly. This is about information trying to find an avenue towards your audience’s collective brain while multimedia dissonance overturns cars and sets bridges on fire along the way.

It’s like this:

Text-Only Is Good

Audio-Only Is Good

Both Together Is Multimedia Dissonance

Go ahead and play the audio while reading the slide. If you’re like me, like the cases John Sweller researched, you immediately notice the dissonance between the two, the slight instances where audio and text diverge. The added “finally” where none exists in the text. The extra “… and in a big way ….”

It’s a lot like that old psychological chestnut. Read the following line aloud:

red green blue green red blue

And then read this line aloud:

red green blue green red blue

That’s dissonance. It won’t sink a presentation. I reckon you lagged by only fractions of a second on that second line.

But compound those fractions of seconds across sixty slides across everyone in your audience and all of the sudden you’re the reason why people get this dry taste in their mouths when they hear the word “PowerPoint.”

The Best Alternative

As I revamp last year’s math slides, I find myself unexceptionally deleting text, building conversations around visuals rather than building conversations into them.

Play the audio while looking at this visual and you’ve got “multimedia assonance” (I’ll spare you the definition).

The sum of the two is greater than its parts.

There’s more I’d like to say about this.

Related:

1. The Uncanny Valley:
   

   The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

[Update: Chris Craft says I’m staking out territory that’s long been claimed. The term is “cognitive overload,” and it means it’s time for me to renew my library card and grab some books.]

I’m trying hard to identify why the look of something matters to me more and more, often rivaling the importance of the thing itself. Why, for example, does a clear, attractive handout matter to me as much as what’s on the handout?

Stephen Fry, in an article which has absolutely nothing to do with teaching, kinda nails it for me.

Apple gets plenty of small things wrong, but one big thing it gets right: when you use a device every day, you cannot help, as a human being, but have an emotional relationship with it. It’s true of cars and cookers, and it’s true of computers. It’s true of office blocks and houses, and it’s true of mobiles and satnavs. [It’s true for me of lessons and handouts. -ed.] A grey box is not good enough, clunky and ugly is not good enough. Sick building syndrome exists, and so does sick hand-held device syndrome. Fiddly buttons, blocky icons, sickeningly stupid nested menus – these are the enemy. They waste time, militate against function and lower the spirits. They make the user feel frustrated and (quite wrongly) dense. Mechanisms so devilishly, stunningly, jaw-dropping clever as the kind our world can now furnish us with are No Good Whatsoever if they don’t also bring a smile to our face, if they don’t make us want to stroke, touch, fondle, fiddle, gurgle, purr and coo. Interacting with a digital device should be like interacting with a baby.

So, yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself. Le style, c’est le truc, as De Buffon would have written today.

It’s the fact that these handouts, these lessons, these presentations, are a daily thing for us and our students. They have to be pretty to look at and touch.

I need to start tearing pages out of all your playbooks on how to make a pretty classroom. If you haven’t already seen my playbook, here’s how to design pretty handouts.