This past week I worked with Prezi and Powerpoint to prepare a presentation for one of my classes. I thought this would be a great opportunity to use new and newer media and compare their effectiveness as learning tools and ways to share thoughts. I mean, presentations are a large part of academia, conferences, lectures, etc. and are all a part of disseminating ideas or knowledge, so to find a format that fits your intentions is important. Here is what I found.
So from my last blog, you discovered that I have done some research on Johann Friedrich Herbart, an educational theorist that no one really remembers. So when it was determined that I would need to share my knowledge of this great theorist I tried to find the best way to organize my thoughts and present them in an engaging fashion. I previously had experience with Powerpoint and was new to Prezi, so I wanted to see how the two differed, and which one best fit my style--or pushed me to a better style of organizing and presenting.
I started working with Prezi over the weekend and after an hour and a half stint of trying to learn the new mechanisms and editing tools, I got fed up at not understanding how I could not do things simply or in a straightforward fashion. I was so sold on all the wonderful bells and whistles Prezi presented in its 4 minute overview that I guess I missed how to make the magic happen. In my tinkering,I remained frustrated and sadly gave up to resort back to something familiar like Powerpoint.
I completed the project in Powerpoint with ease, but thought to myself that this will just be another dull presentation. So after studio time on Monday morning, I went back to Prezi and began "Johann F. Herbart: A Return to the Threshold" for the second time. In Prezi, with a new outlook, I found that I could be more of designer (like our readings of making meaning in the area of Literacy stated). I could link thoughts together in a random manner, and design emphases with size, shape, and accents. I was able to create a narrative with paths that my thoughts followed, not a pre-determined linear slide show. I could place my ideas, images, other media within the project at any random place--there was no format and this left me to be, as I said before, the designer rather than a conformer to the template.
The learning I found from this competition of products, is that both make you think a certain way whether it be linearly with Powerpoint or more freely with Prezi. I found that I was still using my trained thought patterns for Powerpoint and placing things linerly in Prezi. I had to redirect my brain to think differently to create a flow of text. I thought about the future affordances of each type of presentation. If I were to use Powerpoint to align ideas for lectures, then I could easily retreive information on a topic by a simple search (an affordance of Microsoft?), as for Prezi I don't think I could do a keyterm search and find some idea easily. Since the flow of info can fluctuate, it may be more difficult to refer back to an idea. Prezi also, from what I found, can't be printed out or become a static piece of knowledge. Not that this is the intention of Prezi, as it is sold as a presentation tool. But it is so interactive that it may not be possible to see the whole picture even at it's widest lense. To get the whole story you would need to have the presenter go through the paths and tell you what the meaning is behind all the texts.
This is what I found to be of most interest, the presentation itself. I did present with Prezi yesterday, and I think I suffered at it tremendously. I wanted the Notes tool that Powerpoint includes. I didn't want to have notecards in my hand. From the reaction of my peers, the presentation was interesting and different, but what does that mean? Other presentations in the class were centered around Powerpoint and I think they presented their material coherently, it may not have been in an interesting fashion, but they got their point across.
I suppose the best affordance Prezi gives is that it is like a storytelling device that allows people to go through the paths of greater conceptuatlization rather than regurgitation that Powerpoint may lend. For me, I think I still need to understand all the tools that this product lends, so that I can make greater meaning out of my ideas and be able to share those with others. It is a great tool to let me really explore how I will design my ideas and hopefully it won't be similar to the way Powerpoint has formatted my brain.
So the larger question is, and an age old one: How does new media or old media design our brains to think? Do schools promote certain media to mold uniform thinkers?
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
What is New in teaching Multiliteracies?
The New London Group, in A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures, details a pedagogical theory for how to teach multiliteracies in which the mind, society, and learning are components to situate reform. Their goal is to have mastery in practice and they present four components that should be incorporated into a classroom setting to enrich learning of multiliteracies.
These four components resemble very much four steps of instruction constructed by Johann Friedrich Herbart, a philosopher of the mid-1800s. Herbart was a thinker who believed the mind was made up of presentations from the world. The mind worked on those presentations through a ‘threshold of conciousness’, as each idea battled for a spot to be related to another idea. Throughout the four steps students fluctuate between immersion and reflection to constantly keep the threshold active. His goal was to create a many-sided individual.
The four components in summary for each pedagogy (New London; Herbart:
Situated Practice: Immersion in experience and the utilization of available discourses, including those from the students' lifeworlds and simulations of the relationships to be found in workplaces and public spaces.
Clearness: The student is framed in a position engulfed by ideas and presentations from experiences, encounters, and instruction. Student interest must be found in presentations and ideas.
Overt Instruction: Systematic, analytic, and conscious understanding. In the
case of multiliteracies, this requires the introduction of explicit metalanguages, which describe and interpret the Design elements of different modes of meaning.
Association: To situate the ideas into one’s own understanding or into greater knowledge, the teacher would scaffold or help associate ideas.
Critical Framing: Interpreting the social and cultural context of particular
Designs of meaning. This involves the students' standing back from what they are studying and viewing it critically in relation to its context.
System: The student would make connections or links between various presentations of the branches of instruction and form a ‘circle of thought’. The equilibrium and disequilibrium found between each individual idea and link in the mind help form a system of understanding.
Transformed Practice: Transfer in meaning-making practice, which puts the transformed meaning to work in other contexts or cultural sites.
Method: The student took this system and practiced it in the world. Student would practice with system created.
As I was reading this article, I kept thinking how much it sounded familiar, as I am doing a research project on Herbart due this week. So, are these pedagogical components presented by New London Group ‘new’? No and yes. Obviously we never really reinvent the wheel, but we may reinvent it for our purpose. Who knew that we would be able to see ideas from the 1800's fit in with those of the 21st century. Although the language in the New London components was posed for multiliteracies, I think Herbart’s was too. He wanted greater understanding of all experiences and subjects. He wanted students to be many-sided and not concentrate in one effort. Meaning making, or literacy was his goal as well. So once again, I think the old and new parallel quite well. The meaning is just in a new time and space, which is how something becomes new, really.
These four components resemble very much four steps of instruction constructed by Johann Friedrich Herbart, a philosopher of the mid-1800s. Herbart was a thinker who believed the mind was made up of presentations from the world. The mind worked on those presentations through a ‘threshold of conciousness’, as each idea battled for a spot to be related to another idea. Throughout the four steps students fluctuate between immersion and reflection to constantly keep the threshold active. His goal was to create a many-sided individual.
The four components in summary for each pedagogy (New London; Herbart:
Situated Practice: Immersion in experience and the utilization of available discourses, including those from the students' lifeworlds and simulations of the relationships to be found in workplaces and public spaces.
Clearness: The student is framed in a position engulfed by ideas and presentations from experiences, encounters, and instruction. Student interest must be found in presentations and ideas.
Overt Instruction: Systematic, analytic, and conscious understanding. In the
case of multiliteracies, this requires the introduction of explicit metalanguages, which describe and interpret the Design elements of different modes of meaning.
Association: To situate the ideas into one’s own understanding or into greater knowledge, the teacher would scaffold or help associate ideas.
Critical Framing: Interpreting the social and cultural context of particular
Designs of meaning. This involves the students' standing back from what they are studying and viewing it critically in relation to its context.
System: The student would make connections or links between various presentations of the branches of instruction and form a ‘circle of thought’. The equilibrium and disequilibrium found between each individual idea and link in the mind help form a system of understanding.
Transformed Practice: Transfer in meaning-making practice, which puts the transformed meaning to work in other contexts or cultural sites.
Method: The student took this system and practiced it in the world. Student would practice with system created.
As I was reading this article, I kept thinking how much it sounded familiar, as I am doing a research project on Herbart due this week. So, are these pedagogical components presented by New London Group ‘new’? No and yes. Obviously we never really reinvent the wheel, but we may reinvent it for our purpose. Who knew that we would be able to see ideas from the 1800's fit in with those of the 21st century. Although the language in the New London components was posed for multiliteracies, I think Herbart’s was too. He wanted greater understanding of all experiences and subjects. He wanted students to be many-sided and not concentrate in one effort. Meaning making, or literacy was his goal as well. So once again, I think the old and new parallel quite well. The meaning is just in a new time and space, which is how something becomes new, really.
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