In Defense of Slides

I had a fun conversation over on Facebook the other day. I have quite a few colleagues who are advocating for a “device-free classroom.” This is effectively short hand for “digital device free” rather than all devices. After all, a pen and a book are devices, just relatively old ones. In general, the approach advocated by these colleagues is that faculty need to model a digital device free approach to the classroom. This means leaving our phones, tablets, laptops, and smart watches in our office and doing all we can to escape from behind the wall of screens that constitute the teaching stations in most of our modern classrooms. In most cases, these are related: we have to use our phone to log into the teaching stations and so a device free classroom also means a teaching station free classroom. One of the things that appeared throughout the conversation was a return to old school physical slides. This isn’t a euphemism for Powerpointer images or whatever other whizzbang presentation…