In my last entry I talked briefly about the sheer idiocy of people in college. Today in capstone, I witnessed the reason why. Let me explain the assignment that had me walk out of today's class.
A week ago, we were to turn in a progress update presentation of our assignment. This was to be a narrated powerpoint about 7-8 slides in length. Of course, assuming we would actually be you know... presenting our presentations, I kept my slides concise, following the rules for powerpoint presentations as told by Pat Watson and Rosalie Strong in my other two major CST classes. I got an email from the capstone instructor telling me my powerpoint was inadequate and lacked narration. I wrote back a "cheerfully distasteful" email pointing out that effective narration to accompany these slides would create a very large powerpoint that would be difficult to submit. Plus, for a presentation, I thought it best to go before the class and deliver the presentation as opposed to it just being played like some poor boring video. In the end, I will probably have to redo the assignment, but not without writing a very nice letter to he professor explaining why today's class assignment was reason for me to walk out of class.
Today's schedule had us for the first hour an a half of class watching everyone's powerpoint narrations. And everybody just read their slides line for line. I'm sorry, but I have better ways to waste an hour and a half of my time, especially since they are giving feedback on the narration and slides. For crying out loud, I could make a formal report that would be more professional, in MS Word, with my eyes closed, and both my arms chopped off. And so, I walked out. Packed my bag, turned in my name tag, and left while they were setting up the first of 38 presentations, all about 3-5 minutes in length. I didn't even bother to say bye. If nothing else I can use this time to go back and revise my proposal, clean up a few points that were unclear - you know, focus on the stuff that actually matters.
I saw this as a much better alternative to watching a series of self-narrated power point movies for almost two hours.
In response to "The Power of Stupid":