Challenges of Using Prezi:

Instructors who wish to use Prezi for a literacy narrative project do need to be aware that the ease of creating a multimodal composition using Prezi does not translate automatically into the kind of reflection and critical awareness that can foster multimodal literacy.  Indeed, this is true of multimodal projects in general. Though instructors report high levels of motivation when students are assigned multimodal projects (Georgetown University, 2012; Powell, Alexander, and Borton, 2011), these projects also present students with a number of challenges. For example, research reveals that students’ relative familiarity with reading and interpreting multimodal texts does not necessarily prepare them to produce effective multimodal texts.  Instead, without adequate preparation to develop multimodal texts, students frequently rely too heavily on genre conventions with which they are more familiar, whether or not these are rhetorically effective for their projects.  For example, Powell, Alexander, and Borton have described how a student faced with creating a multimodal process essay relied too heavily on traditional PowerPoint conventions, such as bullet points, to create a profile that seemed more teaching aid rather than effective multimodal process essay. Without adequate preparation, students can easily treat Prezi like a slicker version of PowerPoint, simply posting text onto the infinite canvas without attending to the differences between Prezi and any other composing tool. This is, in fact, one of the primary criticisms of Prezi (in addition to those who complain that the ZUI can be disorienting) (Berkun, 2012; Blume, 2012).

Sorapure (2006b) has described two additional problems that frequently occur in multimodal projects, which she terms “pure repetition” and “pure arbitrariness.” Pure repetition occurs when students match modes as when “a Flash project will have a song playing in the background while on the screen the lyrics to the song appear along with images depicting exactly what the lyrics say” (4).  Though a certain degree of repetition might be used effectively in a project to focus on a key idea or to create emphasis, mode matching can also prevent students from recognizing the affordances associated with different modes and can flatten the relationship between them. In contrast, pure arbitrariness occurs when students include elements simply because they are interesting or cool, despite the fact that they are irrelevant to the other components of the project. Arbitrariness harms the coherence of a multimodal text and suggests that the student does not completely understand the affordances of the different modes or how to bring them together effectively.

Prezis are susceptible to these more general problems associated with multimodal composing.  Additionally, Prezi’s templates present another challenge that can be particularly detrimental to Prezi literacy narratives. Though students are free to utilize a blank Prezi and create whatever visual template they wish, students new to Prezi and/or multimodal composing frequently choose to work with Prezi-generated templates.  In addition to providing a guiding metaphor and a visual design for the Prezi, the templates also offer a recommended path through the Prezi (see Figure 7). 

Figure 7: Recommended path through the Prezi "Keys to Success" template

Users are free to alter the visual design as they choose and to alter the path through the Prezi, and my students in fact almost always change the path in some way (often by making it longer or shorter) and frequently alter the visual design as well. Even so, students who stick very closely to the Prezi templates tend to oversimplify their literacy narratives. Though Prezi’s templates help students to select moments from their literacy histories to narrate in a coherent way, these templates can also encourage students to map their experiences onto the template in a way that simplistically recounts how they progressed through various steps to achieve a final, desirable digital literacy. If our goal in assigning literacy narratives is to help students recognize the impact of technology on their identity formation as well as their writing, then such an account can be problematic in the way that it suggests that literacy development is natural, easy, and inevitable. Similarly, if another of our goals is to help students recognize how technology mediates their experience, then the Prezi templates might serve to obscure for some students the work of the template in mediating their own literacy story and the way it can be put together.  Overreliance on the Prezi templates can foreclose the students’ engagement with issues of design and recognition of the rhetoric work of design. It can replicate the problems of other Web 2.0 interfaces where design decisions are taken out of students’ hands and they are left primarily posting content (as Arola has discussed).