I just attended the 2008 Lilly Conference on College Teaching where the theme was “Millenial Learning: Teaching in the 21st Century.” I enjoyed some of the keynote presentations, especially Erica McWilliam’s presentation, “Is Creativity Teachable? Conceptualizing the Creativity/Pedagogy Relationship in Higher Education.” In the presentation, McWilliam noted that creativity is not only vital in the arts, but is also in scientific disciplines where creative thinking leads to key breakthroughs.

While McWilliam believes creativity can be taught, she claimed that it cannot be done simply by giving students free reign of their learning experience. She addressed a critical flaw in the rejection of the traditional sage-on-the-stage model of instruction in favor of the guide-on-the-side approach. According to McWilliam, this trend encourages instructors to become too passive and compromises the level of rigor we traditionally associate with more structured courses and teaching methods. Instead, McWilliam proposed an approach she calls “meddler in the middle.” This approach encourages experiential learning and assignments that foster independent, critical thinking. However, it requires faculty to be actively involved along the way, setting high standards for success and rejecting the notion that all answers are valid.

While I enjoyed some of the keynote presentations at the Lilly Conference, I have to admit that there was also a thorough beating of the dead horse that is the “millenial student.” Several of the presenters rattled off the same sweeping generalizations about the millennial generation that I’ve heard so often at past conferences, including classics like, “They’re multitasking visual learners,” “They prefer to learn by doing,” and everyone’s favorite, “They’re incredibly tech savvy.”

Even if some of these statements are exaggerations, they’re not particularly harmful because most of them are based on facts or at least a relatively scientific survey. However, I find it hard to hide my annoyance when someone tells yet another anecdote about the now-famous (yet nameless) young college student who text messages her friends while listening to her latest class lectures on her iPod and updating her Facebook page—all while driving to her apartment in the sky in a flying hovercar.

It seems no educational-technology conference presentation is complete these days without the obligatory stock photo of a hip, young student with a laptop tucked under his arm, iPod headphones in his hears, a video game controller in one hand, a cell phone in the other. This photo is usually a warning that the presenter is about to describe a bleeding-edge case study that will make use of Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, or some other tool that is revolutionizing education as we know it.

The problem with this recurring emphasis on millenials and their insatiable appetite for bleeding-edge technology is that it makes faculty feel they’re always behind the times. Most of the instructors I know are excited if they can figure out how to embed a YouTube video in Blackboard or insert an audio file in a PowerPoint presentation. Now imagine how those instructors must feel when they go to a conference to discover that PowerPoint and YouTube are “so five years ago.”

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a part of the problem. I just gave a presentation titled “Beyond PowerPoint and YouTube: Making the Most of Multimedia for Language Instruction” at the fall conference for the Illinois Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The session was packed and the attendees were very eager to learn. However, it was clear to me based on their questions and feedback that they would have been just as happy with a session titled, “PowerPoint Tips and Tricks: Making the Most of the Everyday Tool You’ve Never Had Time to Master.”

I’m certainly no PowerPoint evangelist. I like building educational mini-games in Flash, trying out new blogging and wiki tools, and encouraging faculty to use services and sites that often include the world “beta” in their logos. However, I think it’s important to admit that the simplest solution for presenting instructional material is often the best. For many professors, that solution is PowerPoint.

Occasionally, instructors might want a feature that PowerPoint can’t offer. They might want students to be able to view presentations in their web browsers and comment on them. They might want students to be able to create their own presentations with audio-narration and easily share them with others. When those needs arise, it’s important to offer them the simplest, most reliable solution that gets them from point A to point B. If a French professor wants students to create narrated cultural tours of Paris, we should introduce that professor to VoiceThread. We shouldn’t encourage her to establish an island in Second Life, hire three graduate students to build a replica of central Paris, and force her students to create avatars and chat in French inside a bad recreation of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

If you’d like to know more about alternatives to PowerPoint and the features they provide, you can view the multimedia presentation tools comparison I put together in October of 2008. All of the sites listed feature tools I’ve actually tried myself, and I’ve included the pros and cons I discovered after creating and uploading test presentations of my own. Some of the tools I’ve highlighted (e.g., Google Docs) might not win me any awards for being on the bleeding edge of instructional technology. However, as someone who knows a lot of professors, I know from experience that it’s important not to overestimate the tech needs and wants of faculty. And as a student who is technically a millennial by some definitions, I think it’s important not to overestimate the tech needs and wants of millenials. After all, I’m living proof that some millenials are happy with a traditional, well-delivered lecture with minimal fuss. And for the record, I’ve never text messaged a friend while updating my Facebook page.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to take my hovercar in for servicing. My info console has been acting up and it won’t play my video mail or let me make online bill payments while driving at hyperspeed.