The "improper use of bullets kills learning". You knew this, right? Richard Mayer of the University of California thinks so. You knew he meant PowerPoint bullets, right? Richard says:

"The success of PowerPoint depends in part on the fundamental need of people to communicate with others within the same community of practice. It is worthwhile to distinguish between two possible goals in making a PowerPoint presentation - information presentation, in which the goal is to present information to the audience, and cognitive guidance, in which the goal is to guide the audience in their processing of the presented information."

Sounds to me like he's given this some thought. Hmmmm. If you care about actually communicating with your PowerPoint slides, either in information or cognitive mode ... and for some people I know the need for communication with their slides is considered optional, then maybe you would be interested in reading Cliff Atkinson at Beyond Bullets, Tony Ramos at Tony's PowerPoint Weblog or Jucca Korpela's writing about Wiio's laws, which are, or so she says, humoristically formulated serious observations by Osmo A. Wiio, a Finnish researcher of human communication, about how human communication usually fails except by accident.

I'm wondering when folks at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology think Rico, the border collie, might be ready for PowerPoint? I'm thinking I know where he could get a job putting together presentations. And he could probably take over this blog in his spare time without missing a beat.