Advantages of Prezi:

As an “infinite canvas tool for composing” Prezi can offer several important benefits to digital literacy narrative projects.  Prezi makes the online performance of self highly visible by giving users considerable freedom in how they choose to self-represent. And because Prezi implicitly evokes metaphors of performance and movement it provides an easy way to conceive of one’s work on Prezi as a digital performance of the self.  The issue of performance is inherent to Prezi, which, in fact, evokes public presentation with its very name and relies on performance metaphors in a number of ways, including through many of the templates offered to users (see Figure 3). Consequently, when creating a Prezi literacy narrative, students are invited by the program to conceive of their work as a presentation, which already is more closely aligned with public performance than they might otherwise assume of autobiographical writing.  

Figure 3: Prezi's "Center Stage" template explicity evokes performance.

The openness of Prezi also encourages students to practice two of the skills that scholars have identified as particularly important to successful multimodal composing: coherence and selection. Kathleen Blake Yancey (2004), among others, has identified coherence, or “patterning of information” as “key to these new ways of writing, these new literacies, these new textures” (94). She further explains, “coherence in digital texts seems to be a function of a pattern that is created through the relationships between and among context, screen, image, the visual, the aural, the verbal, and with repetition and multiplicity as the common features” (95).  The Prezi canvas is initially an intimidating blank page, without even the reassuring page or slide boundaries that students expect when composing in Word or PowerPoint. Though students can create boundaries in a number of ways in Prezi, they have considerably more freedom in doing so than many are used to. Consequently, my students immediately search for ways to provide structure and coherence to their Prezis, and this provides an opportunity to discuss with them how to create coherence in multimodal texts. 

Coherence is created at the intersection of content and form in Prezi literacy narratives as writers choose which moments to narrate and which modes to use to narrate those moments. This process of selection—particularly of modes—is one of the most difficult for writers new to multimodal composition; as Sorapure (2006b) explains "Bringing together multiple modes in a single composition is often a difficult task. After all, in writing essays students have to worry only about working with text, and this is challenging enough. In new media compositions, students are being asked to not only use several different individual modes, but also to bring these modes together in space and time. In essence, they are orchestrating or directing these different resources."

To foster coherence and the process of selection, Prezi encourages users to devise a central, visual metaphor around which to organize their Prezis, and choosing this metaphor is one of the central ways that Prezi encourages students to own their performance of identity online as well.  Prezi templates make metaphor visible by providing a dominant visual image as the background for a Prezi, onto which users arrange content (See Figure 4). Choosing a strong metaphor helps students to draft coherent stories by pointing them toward related moments to select and narrate. For Sondra Perl (2010) and Cynthia Selfe (2010), this process of selection is key to the transformative potential of literacy narratives in general since it becomes the basis for the writers’ performance of identity, which can include how writers wish to appear or hope to be in the future. The visibility of metaphor when composing with Prezi is one of the major advantages that this program offers, and choosing a central metaphor and design template to guide their literacy story is an important first step for students at the outset of the Prezi literacy narrative project.

Figure 4: Sample Prezi template--"The Journey"

Prezi templates are based on a wide variety of metaphors and include “the journey,” “tip of the iceberg,” “stepping stones,” and “from roots to results” (See Figure 5).

Figure 5: Sampling of Prezi templates

However, some students enjoy crafting their own Prezi template based on a metaphor not provided by Prezi.  For example, one of my students chose to use a metaphor drawn from Pokemon.  In his narrative, he considered how the process of learning to play Pokemon as a child was similar to learning to use technology and in fact facilitated his learning process, but he also created a visual template that drew on images from Pokemon, including a map of a Pokemon town through which he guided readers (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: Student-created Prezi template based on Pokemon

The design template that students choose not only fosters coherence by helping them select among their stories but also by helping them select among the available modes they can use to put their Prezi together.  Prezi makes it easy to embed videos (self-created or from the Internet), images, and audio files.  As a result, students are able to explore a full range of multimodal composing techniques and in fact must consider how to balance alphabetic information with non-alphabetic.  Taken together, this combination of multimodal elements constitutes the digital self that they perform within the Prezi literacy narrative. Since the project is autobiographical, students also contend with how visible they want to be in their own Prezi—do they want to include personal photographs of themselves, for example, or choose symbols or other types of images to represent themselves?  And is it fair to say that either type of representation is a truer representation than the other?

Because of its ZUI, Prezi also allows students to capture a sense of movement through time (literacy growth) and the relative importance of various key moments on their development.  In fact, Prezi forces writers to think through issues of movement, and movement is central to how students interpret their literacy stories in Prezi. For example, if a student moves in a linear way through his or her literacy story and using a design template such as “finding buried treasure,” that student will almost inevitably narrate an extremely positive story about literacy development wherein digital literacy is equated to the treasure that the student has discovered.  If a student chooses an alternate path through the Prezi template, creating a path that backtracks, for example, then he or she may demonstrate more skepticism toward the desirability of digital literacy or the process through which it was acquired or focus on obstacles encountered during the process.  And if a student works backward through a design template—for example, starting with the discovery of a buried treasure and then moving backwards through the template so that at the conclusion of the Prezi the student has moved away from the treasure—he or she might contrast an initially naïve perspective on literacy with a final, more realistic or critical perspective based on the experiences recounted.

Though Prezi is not necessarily unique in the way that it foregrounds issues of self-representation or movement, it does offer an accessible way to accomplish a number of the goals we might have for students in assigning a digital literacy narrative project.  And at the same time, students can begin to explore the limitations and constraints that this “infinite-canvas” tool imposes as well.  In my experience, the most limiting factor has been fonts—Prezi supports a very limited number of fonts and students are constrained to particular fonts by the template they choose for narrative.  Interestingly, though, this limitation on fonts has actually prompted in-class discussions about fonts since students suddenly see fonts more clearly—even in word processing programs—when they find their choices limited in an unexpected way.