Abstract
Teacher-student discourse is increasingly mediated through, by and with digital technologies. In-class discussions have found new, textually-rich venues online; chalk and whiteboard lectures are rapidly giving way to PowerPoint presentations. Yet, what does this mean experientially for students? This article investigates college students' experiences of PowerPoint in the classroom. The research asks: What are the tacit and pedagogical dimensions of the PowerPoint presentation for students? The method of inquiry is informed by a hermeneutic phenomenological approach and by the heuristic notions of pedagogical tact and thoughtfulness.
Highlights
I am walking along a main corridor in the college where I teach
How shall the PowerPoint learning experience be delimited and described? If a teacher uses PowerPoint to display a few photographs, shall we call that a PowerPoint presentation? Yes
Can we group that teaching-learning instance in the same experiential category as the lecture delivered at the hand of a two hundred-slide PowerPoint presentation of bulleted text and clipart? What of the class that integrates PowerPoint with all the available tools of a Smart Classroom or interactive whiteboard? And what do we make of an identical PowerPoint slide-set in the hands of the monotoned “slide-reading” teacher-lecturer versus the lively teacher-dramatist?
Summary
PowerPoint presentations vary significantly from one teacher to another, from one discipline to another, and much more so than is the case, say, with chalkboard-supported classes. The teacher selectively introduces students to representative examples or images of different ways of knowing and making sense of the world. Together these examples comprise the explicit curriculum. The student experiences the teacher as presentational and immediate, whereas the projected PowerPoint slide is representative of the subject-at-hand. The largeness of the projected image, its location at the front of the classroom, as well as the sudden flash of slide changes, occasional animations and even forgotten screensavers, render PowerPoint a visual presence to be reckoned with. PowerPoint exercises a powerful presentative sway with students, underlining its authority as the indicative or representational
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