I recently attended an horrific power point presentation and it's no accident
that the speaker comes from a faculty of medicine. In fact, medicine
faculties use this instead of textbooks or required reading. They publish
their slides and students read them to study. Power point is perfect for
medical education where information has been reduced to matching of symptoms
lists to pathologies, tests and treatment lists. Disciplinary discourse has
much to do with the propagation of this technology.
Having had some good experiences with "bending" power point toward my
rhetorical purpose through pasting visual images onto empty slides, I'm
interested now, however, in trying "inspiration" -- a visual mapping software
program that I frequently use with my students for outlining in tutorials-- as
a less constricting form of visual aid. I used to avoid visuals in the
classroom, but I think there are some compelling arguments for using them
related to accessibility and presenting information through different learning
styles.
The interesting thing about "inspiration" is that it allows you to create
visual "bubbles" but it also allows you to use text to connect information, so
the links can be described or categorized or qualified. I think it is capable
of presenting a much more layered, nuanced and complex set of ideas which is
in fact what it was designed to do. It also has the ability to hyper link to
other files so that you can move to more and more complex versions or vice a
versa to more clear or simplified versions; you can also go to the web, etc.
Do other people have visual soft ware that is better than power point and if
so would you share it?
Roger Graves wrote:
> In *Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print*,
> Bolter argues that computer science graduate students in the 80s
> "constructed a technology that was congenial to their culture" (209). This
> is part of a larger argument that we shape technologies to our purposes;
> early newspapers, for example, were revolutionary in purpose, though they
> usually don't function that way now. PowerPoint and other presentation
> technologies seem to me to follow this rule: they have been shaped by us
> to do certain kinds of work (initially, to help make business
> presentations more effective). That university professors use this
> technology for what Bolter calls "unidirectional" communication should
> come as no surprise, given that it would lend itself to this (lecturing is
> the old technology way to communicate unidirectionally) and not to
> "talking back".
>
> But PowerPoint is not in and of itself bad, despite the
> idea that it has certain affordances (Donald Norman's term) that push it
> into certain uses. One of these
> affordances, for example, is the ability for the presentation to be posted
> on the web where it can become part of a dialogue or polylogue or what
> Bolter calls "network culture". I use it extensively, but I rarely use it
> alone. It is usually embedded in an environment including face-to-face
> discussion, email exhanges, even blogs. And people stretch PowerPoint into
> weirder shapes than that--some use it as a word processor because their
> companies won't purchase Word!
>
> Roger Graves
> Associate Professor
> Department of English, DePaul University
>
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