See Claire's post: http://sccrfn1.wordpress.com/2008/02/06/tufte/
The epistemological problem of Powerpoint vs. its functionality is where I think Selber comes into play. When information design concerns digital technology, we must grasp the technology's function to maximize its rhetorical potential. Powerpoint (as do many programs) exists where design exceeds intentionality. Although designers of Powerpoint certainly have an intentional plan for how Powerpoint is to be used (linear assemblage and projection of plates or slides, each of which impose a conceptual limit--a framed lexia or unit of meaning), their intentions for the programs functionality also causes them to implement features by which we can break their intentional plan. In other words, by the unintentional consequences of program design, we can circumvent the logic of Powerpoint by using the very tools installed in Powerpoint. An example is the Presentation I did not Peer Response in English 605. I projected Elbow and Balanoff's conceptual map of Peer Response and linked parts of the map to other slides, so that 1) a viewer does not have to, and is not encouraged to, progress through the slides linearly, and 2) the presentation becomes a tool that can be used in non-presentational settings. Other epistemological confines remain in this composition, such as using slides to represent individual units of meaning/message.
Basically, we should not forbid Powerpoint; rather, we teach students to bust it open and see what falls out.
About Me
- J. Edwin Paschke-Johannes
- n. ('jA-'ed-w&n-pash-kE-jO-'han-es) 1. A male homosapien of U.S. citizenship, w/ diffused hereditary origins from the Polish, Swiss, German, Lithuanian, Nebraska white trash, and Minnesota backwoods missionary. 2. Name of said male homosapien. 3. One of few individuals, if not the only one existent, to be credited, on public records and various publicly distributed documents, with a Bachelor of Arts in English Education from Midland Lutheran College and a Master of Arts in English, specializing in Creative Writing (Fiction), from Iowa State University, and enrolled in a doctoral program in English, specializing in Rhetoric and Composition, at Ball State University. 4. One of a married couple that have adopted two children, a precocious female and winsome male, from Ethiopia, thus constructing a nuclear family known as “multicultural,” or specifically “transracial,” and grafting onto the couple’s mutual/individual family tree a branch that, to America's racial psyche, is considered radically divergent.
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