If your professor is just reading text bullet points from a slide, he sucks at public speaking and presentation skills.

Don't blame the medium for poor public speaking skills. I was just in a 2-day classroom setting this week and the presenter was brilliant - switching from slides, which they annotated with a digital pen while presenting, to whiteboard, to discussion seamlessly, without losing interest or focus from the students.

Public speaking is a skill like any other that any educator needs to be good at. Don't blame the medium for your educator's poor public speaking skills.

Using powerpoint (or related tech) enables sucking at public speaking and presentation skills, in a way that lecturing in front of a {black,white}board does not.

One of my favorite education-related blogs is University Diaries, by Margaret Soltan (an English professor at George Washington University). She writes quite entertainingly and excoriatingly about the use of PowerPoint as an alternative to teaching: http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?s=powerpoint

I had a philosophy prof that would put up his lecture on (relatively) dense slides and then proceed to stand in front of the slides (not looking at them) and give the whole talk exactly as the text on the slides. It was quite amazing. And since he wasn't actually reading them, it was a good presentation.

We've had the tech to box up big lectures since VCRs went mainstream. That's the easy (and cheap) part.