It was a pleasure attending last Wednesday’s staff meeting. In addition to the usual yummy sandwiches and cookies, I was particularly impressed by Tom’s VOCAT demonstration and our discussion on whether the use of Micro PowerPoint and technology in general opens up new possibilities or sets the limits of our analytical thinking skills. It is probably not an either-or question. Since Kate, Luke, David, Mikhail, Deborah, and Anthony have already elaborated on this topic through their recent postings, it won’t be necessary to reiterate the points they already made. There seems to be a general consensus that “PP” is a kind of necessary evil that should be handled by skilled hands until a better tool is invented. I agree that PowerPoint and other animated presentation software have an advantage especially in a global setting since image and non-verbal means of communication oftentimes enable us to overcome language and cultural barriers.
From http://www.blakearchive.org
Click to enlarge.
I wonder, however, whether people have used PowerPoint or other multimedia presentation tools in English literature classes. I remember once in my Romanticism class the professor presented Blake’s illuminated poems in slides for us to read, which for me was quite a different way of “experiencing” poetry. It may sound counter-intuitive, but poetry might be the literary genre whose reading experience can be enhanced by certain visual aids due to the pictorial aspect of poetic language, which was illustrated by Horace’s phrase ut pictura poesis (”as is painting so is poetry”) or Derrida’s emphasis on the spatial dimension of writing. Do those in literature or humanities have any stories to share or any tips to offer regarding the use of multimedia resources in class other than film screening? Another question in my mind is, if creating bullet points and inserting animated graphs and charts for a PowerPoint presentation indeed can be considered a genre of writing, how do we incorporate it into the existing composition curriculum? I would like to hear your thoughts on this.
The thing to remember about Powerpoint is that it’s really a (basic but very usable) multimedia authoring tool. Sure, it’s usually used for bullet points and graphs, but it can do a lot more. Most interesting, I think, is not when it’s used for classroom presentations by the teacher for the class, but by the students to create projects. I’ve seen it used, and had my students use it, in this way many times, and the results can be startling to the students (and to me). An example is my students’ (from several years ago) digital poetry projects. Each student chose a poem, thought about how to divide it into sections (not necessarily lines) that could each be assigned a slide. Then they chose images, different ways to display the text (fonts, transitions, sizes), backgrounds, and music (and voice) to accompany the poem. What came out (in the best cases) was deeper thinking about the poetry, deeper engagement in the interpretation and presentation, deeper connections to other poems and other works of literature and to other classes and life experience.Because students (often) already know PP or (if they don’t already know it) can learn it relatively quickly and easily, it frees them to focus on the choices and decisions and intepretive leaps necessary in creating (not just consuming) a multimedia presentation of a poem. I’ve also seen the same tool used quite successfully for autobiographical or fictional digital storytelling projects.You can see some examples of this kind of work (minus the music, unfortunately, because of copyright restrictions, and minus some of the mistakes) in our digital gallery, Looking at Learning, Looking Together –http://cndls.georgetown.edu/crossroads/vkp/dportfolio
Reply to Joe
I was wondering if you’ve seen our website. We’ve been using Power Point to create “Illuminated Texts” of various works from poetry to Hemingway. The kids are starting to use Flash now — just because it has a lot more power and is more easily seen across browsers. The website is http://www.awaytoteach.net and make sure to use a browser other than Internet Explorer. Thanks.
Reply to Joe Scotese