Labels: legal

This is your brain:

This is your brain on the bar exam:

Any questions?

Labels: legal

Labels: legal

Edward Tufte may have written the book on the cognitive shortcomings of PowerPoint, but from several recent classes at the law school where my professors have subjected me to an onslaught of slides, I can point to another problem: eyestrain. You may have noticed how PowerPoint users are in the habit of turning off all the lights in a room while they are presenting. While in many circumstances looking at a bright screen in a dark room is no problem (like at the movies), the way in which PowerPoint presentations are viewed in a law school classroom tends to create eyestrain. Because us law students generally take notes on a computer, our eyes are forced to move back and forth through the darkness between two points of light, and the resulting high contrast can be jarring.

What is to be done? If I had my way, I would banish PowerPoint from the law school classroom because the relentless sequentiality of a slideshow straitjackets classroom discussion by forcing it into the same order of the slides. Quite often, a clever student will anticipate a point that the instructor makes several slides later, causing her to jump back and forth and leading to much confusion.

But so long as teachers continue to use PowerPoint in the classroom, the thing to do is to leave the lights on and use a high-contrast slide layout that does not get washed out by ambient light. Black text on a white background is surprisingly readable in all but the brightest lights, as is blue text on a yellow background, or white text on a green background (think highway signs).

This post marks the first in a new series on the blog about ergonomics in the legal academy and workplace. For all their brilliance in the courtroom, lawyers are a pretty dumb bunch when it comes to working smart. Stay tuned for further pontification.

Labels: ergonomics, legal