In grad school we had a professor who taught molecular biology for engineers, and he was super into making animations for his class...little blobby enzymes happily plugging along the DNA track, doing their particular transcribing duties. Great. He was also super into selling the idea of animations as a teaching tool. Not so great, because it seemed obvious to me that his presentations were successful because he put a lot of thought and work into them and not because they were animated - and that giving animation tools to lesser lecturers with would likely be a time suck that made their bad presentations even worse.
PowerPoint, it seems to me, has the same problem. I wish every instructor for my theology courses could be forced to read Tufte's book on PowerPoint. Which I didn't even like that much, all those years ago when I read it, because I believe that good PowerPoint presentations are possible and useful. But there are so very many terrible ones out there trying to prove me wrong.
For example. I was just looking over the slides for the lecture I missed last night and I cannot tell you what the guy's major point might have been. There are 26 slides about the history and peculiarities of the doctrine of the trinity, and then on the last slide he appears to say, "...and no sane person can possibly understand any of this, so we should just give up and revert back to the God of the Bible, who was unambiguously One."
Don't quote me on that, that's a wild guess. But why should I have to wildly guess? Shouldn't the evening's thesis be obvious even to the language-impaired foreigner who missed the lecture? Darn you, PowerPoint.
It all gives me a headache, anyway. If God is the name we give to the thing so big we can't hope to conceive of it, then there are no wrong answers - just an enormous set of pictures and approximations that are true only to the extent that they help us become better individuals and a better human race. God is one, God is three, God is many, there is no God - all true! Can't we all just get along??
I'm seriously considering Pastafarianism.
No comments:
Post a Comment