A great blog post by Seth Godin on why university text books are a waste of time & money and are inherently out of date. There is a natural role for presentations here.
Is there anything better that a university lecturer can use to transfer an idea in an hour or 2? Putting it up on Slideshare for free afterwards gives the most return to the government education budget. A creative common license makes it easy for lecturers to borrow the best slides from each other. Over time constantly updated "crowd-sourced" education decks will emerge that beat any text book easily. Better teaching material, no cost.
Related: a post on the Duarte blog on how presentations could mark the end of the boring press release.

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