Work in progress - what is PowerPoint? educating engineering students in its use and abuse

PowerPoint software has become the standard presentation tool used in professional engineering workplaces and in engineering classrooms. The current pervasiveness of the software has led us to consider whether we should view PowerPoint as merely a medium for communication, a tool, or if we should examine the uses practitioners make of the software for signs that they have assigned it to the level of a communication genre, with comparable status to the "progress report", "research report", or "engineering change order". Our work in progress is focused on identifying the conventions of the use of PowerPoint that indicate that it has assumed a new status. We base our conclusions on comparing communication genres (like a scientist\´s conference presentation and a team leader\´s status report on a corporate project) that once were very distinct but now exhibit striking similarities in the ways in which content is processed and conveyed. In bringing this analysis to the classroom, we hope to help our students recognize the power and inherent limitations of PowerPoint