More Than a Fancy Overhead

1. More Than a Fancy Overhead PowerPoint as a Tool in Composition

2. How We Use PowerPoint Traditional Uses of PowerPoint in the Classroom: • Glorified Overhead • Everything But the Kitchen Sink • Passive Medium for Students

3. What students tell us: • In a series of my own classroom surveys students indicated their interest in more of a dialectic between instructor and digital mediums.

4. Transmissionist Approach Approach we are most familiar with: • Linear Progression (Slide 1, 2, 3, etc) • Instructor controls progression • Instructor decides what is important and the depth of coverage

5. Constructivist Approach • Organized around a central topic • Students comments and questions direct lecture material • Students decide depth of the presentation • Use of hyperlinks… In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich argues that hyperlinking obliterates traditional hierarchies and ordered rhythms.

6. Digital Rhetoric Possibilities: E-mailWeb PagesElectronic Slides/PowerPoint VideogamesWeb logs/Blogs Databases WikisVideo Mash-ups Photoshopped Images

7. Assigning Action Settings • By assigning actions to objects in a presentation, a PowerPoint presentation is transformed from a Slide Show into an interactive web page. • Any object can be used to link to another page in the PowerPoint presentation or an external web page. • Assign “Action Settings” in Slide Show menu.

8. Ethos Rhetorical Appeals Pathos Logos

9. Glorified Overhead Here the instructor essentially uses the slide for “background” with occasional reference

10. Everything But the Kitchen Sink Harriet Jacobs: Response to the Inhumanity of Slavery • Stowe uses glorification of the slave population and a vicious representation of slaveholders in order to depict the inhumanness and absurdity with which slaves were treated and the utter injustice of the institution of slavery as a whole. • Example of glorification: “But as she [Jacobs’s grandmother] grew older she evidenced so much intelligence, and was so faithful that her master and mistress could not help seeing it was for their interest to take care of such a valuable piece of property” (Jacobs 1810). • Example of vicious depiction of slaveholders: “Yet I would have chosen this [living in hiding] rather than my lot as a slave, though white people considered it an easy one; and it was so compared with the fate of others. I was never cruelly over-worked; I was never lacerated with the whip from head to foot; I never had my heel-strings cut to prevent my running away; I was never chained to a log and forced to drag it about, while I toiled in the fields from morning till night; I was never branded with hot iron, or torn by bloodhounds,” though as she points out, many other slaves were burdened by such cruelty (Jacobs 1822).

11. Passive Medium for Students Here students are asked simply to view the images or data and have little real engagement with it.

12. Ethos • Describes an appeal based on the authority and credibility of the writer(s)—the writer’s qualifications or appeal.

13. Pathos • Traditional name for appeals to emotions or values. Think of pathos as ways for moving an audience to do what you’d like them to do: change their position, agree with you, or take action.

14. Logos • Traditional name for appeals to reason or logic. A logical argument appeals to the mind. It proposes a logical position and supports that position with facts and data as evidence.

15. Summary • PowerPoint is only a tool. By strategically employing it to create opportunities for active learning, lecturers can capitalize on PowerPoint's strength as a presentation platform to engage students in the learning process. + = Student Centered Learning

16. Works Cited • http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/tutorials/powerpoint/lecturing.html • http://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/advice/powerpoint.htm • http://ah043.k12.sd.us/Project%20Files/powerpoint%20handouts.htm#interactive • http://www.digitalrhetoric.org/