More Than a Fancy Overhead
PowerPoint as a Tool in Composition
How We Use PowerPoint
Traditional Uses of PowerPoint in the Classroom:
Glorified Overhead
Everything But the Kitchen Sink
Passive Medium for Students
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.
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
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.
Digital Rhetoric Possibilities:
E-mail
Web Pages
Electronic Slides/PowerPoint
Videogames
Web logs/Blogs
Databases
Wikis
Video Mash-ups
Photoshopped Images
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.
Ethos
Rhetorical
Appeals
Pathos Logos
Glorified Overhead
Here the instructor essentially uses the slide
for “background” with occasional reference
Everything But the Kitchen Sink
Stowe uses glorification of the slave population and a vicious
Harriet representation of slaveholders in order to depict the inhumanness and
absurdity with which slaves were treated and the utter injustice of the
Jacobs: institution of slavery as a whole.
Example of glorification: “But as she [Jacobs’s grandmother] grew older
Response 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).
to the 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
Inhumanity 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
of Slavery 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).
Passive Medium for Students
Here students are asked simply to
view the images or data and have
little real engagement with it.
Ethos
Describes an appeal based on the authority
and credibility of the writer(s)—the
writer’s qualifications or appeal.
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.
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.
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
Works Cited
http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/tutorials/powerpo
int/lecturing.html
http://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/advice/powerpoint.
htm
http://ah043.k12.sd.us/Project%20Files/powerpoint%20h
andouts.htm#interactive
http://www.digitalrhetoric.org/