Composing the Self Online: Prezi Literacy Narratives

Angela Laflen

Marist College

Invention:

In order to use Prezi for literacy narratives instructors need to be provide scaffolding to help students develop a critical perspective on both this platform and their literacy stories.  In my own practice, I have found that the inventional activities involved in crafting a Prezi literacy narrative can encourage the kind of awareness that composition scholars stress as central to multimodal literacy and can help to foreclose some of the challenges involved in using Prezi.

Students in my Digital Writing course were asked to use Prezi to create a digital literacy narrative that focused on how they became a “digital citizen.” Leading up to the project, we read Jim Porter’s “Why Technology Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter’s Tale”, Katherine Hayles’s “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” and Stuart Selbers’s Multiliteracies as well as several Prezi literacy narratives, and students wrote reflections and responses to these critical works that also asked them to begin the work of narrating their own literacy story and considering how it related—or not—to the ideas discussed by Porter, Hayles, and Selber. Feedback on this informal writing was intended to help students dig as deeply as possible into their literacy stories and reflect on them critically.

We also completed several inventional activities intended to help students prepare to create the Prezi literacy narrative. First, to diminish the problems associated with overreliance on Prezi-generated templates, I have found it helpful to have students narrate their literacy story using several different central metaphors and/or different paths through their story prior to beginning work on their Prezi.  For example, one student might choose to narrate his story around the idea of “uncharted territory” and then see how the story changes if he organizes it around the idea of “ripples.”  Not only does this activity help students develop details to use in their literacy narrative, but it also helps them assume agency over the story.  It is more difficult to see the progression of literacy development as “natural” when you are narrating it several different ways.  In this way, students can test different metaphors and paths through their story before diving into the work of creating their Prezis.

Students also need to understand the affordances of the different modes in order to make informed choices about how to use and combine them effectively in their Prezis.  My students are typical of college-aged students who are comfortable consuming a wide variety of media but less comfortable composing in multiple modes themselves because they have the most practice in alphabetic forms of representation.  Invention activities focused on introducing students to the different modalities they can use and what each one excels at is critical to the success of the Prezi literacy narrative project.

I find it helpful to assign Gunther Kress’s “Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media” in combination with Jane Stevens’s tutorial “Multimedia Storytelling” to generate discussion about what makes multimodal composing unique. Students wrestle with Kress’s contention that “When writing appears on the screen it is subordinated to the logic of the image; just as image could appear on the page, though subordinated to the logic of writing,” but discussing this in class helps them understand how central the work of design is to multimodal composing. A multimedia journalist, Stevens does a fantastic job of outlining the different modes that students can choose among and the affordances of each one. Students brainstorm in response to the questions she poses in her tutorial to help them choose how to use modes in their Prezi. This activity helps students to see what parts of their story might most effectively be narrated in text and points them toward other resources and materials they need to gather in preparing to create their Prezis.

Finally, I ask students to create a storyboard for their Prezi in order to think through issues of pacing, space, and multimodality in a concrete way.  In describing the importance of storyboarding as a inventional strategy for multimodal projects, Nathaniel I. Córdova (2013) explains that, “A distinct focus on the storyboard, as part of a digital storytelling project, features the process of cultural production, helps students visualize narrative, reinforces the fragmentary nature of texts, and the importance of the articulations drawn through every frame of their project.  Moreover, the storyboard, as precursor to a unitary product to be made ready for circulation, reminds the student of the project’s placement in a flow of cultural products” (158). And he stresses that the storyboard will be most successful when it “emphasizes visuality and multimodality over an alphabetical text logic” (159).  In other words, storyboarding helps bring the “logic of the screen” to life for students.

During storyboarding it is important for students to think through issues of pacing and space, which requires them to carefully plan how to use frames in their Prezis.  Some students think of their Prezis in terms of “acts” in a play or scenes in a movie.  The question is, “how long should the scene last?” How much detail does it need to include? And how many scenes or acts will the Prezi require in order to tell the story the student wants to tell.  Users can manipulate space and pacing in a variety of ways in Prezi, for example, by including more or less text on the screen and by proximity on the Prezi canvas.  Information placed closed together on the screen will require less time to zoom to than information placed further apart, subtly communicating to the reader the relationship among ideas and part of the composition.

These inventional activities not only help to prepare students to create coherent, critical Prezi literacy narratives but also introduce multimodal composing techniques to them.  The result has been more coherent and purposeful Prezi literacy narratives.  Consequently, in providing feedback to students on their Prezis I have been able to focus on the relations between the modes they chose to use and on the meanings they wished to convey about how technology has influenced their literacy development.