Examples:

Student Project 1:

Stephanie’s project, “Touching the Sky,” brings together word, image, video, and sound in a way that is mostly metaphoric, and she chose the template, titled “from roots to results,” of a tree stretching toward the sky to visually represent her story of literacy growth. Stephanie focuses on her experiences journaling and describes the process of moving from handwritten to digital journals as evidence of her development into a digital citizen. As she narrates her story she moves visually from the roots of the tree upward toward the sky, and her Prezi concludes with her having achieved digital citizenship and attaining the “clouds.” As a literacy narrative, her meaning is clear: this is a highly positive account of digital literacy, which is posited as unquestionably something to be desired and also unquestionably something that she has attained.  When she does focus on a potential limitation of technology—a computer crash led to the erasure of her early digital journal—she equates this to falling from the tree and must begin her climb upward again as she develops strategies—such as saving multiple backup copies and posting her work online—to help overcome this obstacle.

 

Stephanie admits to having taken a conservative approach to putting her Prezi together, but she did experiment with movement in the Prezi.  Though she chose to use a Prezi template, she altered the template by adding clouds to the visual design and by changing the path through her Prezi, as she does when she describes “falling” from the tree.  She also experimented with the visual dimension of text, as when she uses color and placement to capture the sense of “Falling.”

At times, this Prezi relies very heavily on mode matching, as when Stephanie matches the verbal description of beginning to write on a computer (“At last, a computer was added to the mix”) with an audio clip of a triumphant trumpet blast. In this case, the audio does function to add emphasis to the words, but throughout her Prezi, Stephanie privileges the verbal and subordinates other modes, which function primarily to illustrate or amplify the words. As a result, she does not explore the relationship between modes or what one mode has to offer that another does not as fully as she might.

In responding to this Prezi, then, I encouraged Stephanie to develop metonymic associations between the modes she used and in doing so to develop a richer, and likely more critical, examination of digital literacy as well. Rather than simply matching modes, how could she develop broader metonymic associations that would establish context or suggest the implications of the metaphor substitutions she has employed? For example, it would be interesting to problematize the relatively simplistic equation of digital literacy with the “clouds” by employing words or other modes that question in some way this equation. Or if she really does believe that digital literacy is as valuable as she suggests, she could be encouraged to discuss how she developed this view of literacy in more detail in her narrative.

Student Project 2:

Lauren’s project, “A Humanly Digital Literacy Unlocked,” makes a more subtle use of metaphor than do many student Prezis.  At the beginning, Lauren presents an image of a door, locked with a large padlock, from which hangs a pair of pink ballet slippers. Though Lauren refers to the image of the lock in her title, suggesting that her narrative will “unlock” what it means to be digitally literate or at least her own experience of becoming digitally literate, it is ultimately the image of the ballet slippers that gives most coherence to her story as Lauren associates the experience of becoming literate to dancing and finally posits the Prezi itself as a kind of dance.

In contrast to Stephanie, Lauren experiments much more with movement in the Prezi, zooming in and out of family pictures and juxtaposing these with quotations about literacy and narrative that puts these images and her words in new contexts and associations that give them richer meaning.  Allusions to dance throughout the Prezi, in the form of words and images, helps the reader to interpret Lauren’s meaning that communication of all types, including the Prezi, is a type of dance.

Though Lauren is bold in experimenting with movement in her Prezi, she does rely very heavily on alphabetic expression, and some frames are so text heavy as to be difficult to read on the screen. In responding to this Prezi, I encouraged Lauren to consider how to revise her text-heavy frames to make reading this Prezi easier and to consider how other modes might help to substitute for some of the text she has included. I also urged Lauren to more clearly develop the metaphoric substitutions that connect the different elements of the project so that her associations and the relations between modes—in particular her provocative association with the movement in a Prezi with dance—might not go unnoticed by the reader.

Student Project 3:

Ian’s untitled project, which begins with the first line “I’m a certified cyborg,” employs the Prezi template “tip of the iceberg.”  Although the visual metaphor of the largely submerged iceberg, only the top of which is visible above the water, helps give coherence to his digital literacy narrative, he does not simply map his story onto the template.  Instead, he uses it in combination with movement through the Prezi to problematize his literacy story.

Ian’s Prezi begins at the bottom of the iceberg image with the statement that he is a cyborg. To explain how he became a cyborg, he quickly moves to the top of the image and describes writing in isolation as a child, which is equated to the image of the lone island.  As Ian narrates the experience of learning to write for online communities of readers and merging his social and academic worlds on the Internet, he moves down the image to reveal the large iceberg underneath the water, and he ultimately ends the Prezi where he began it, by focusing on the statement “I’m a certified cyborg.”

Ian primarily relied on the modes of words and visuals in his Prezi, but he does not match these modes as completely as Stephanie did. Instead, he edited a number of the visuals to add arrows, x’s, or other, usually red, edits to convey his meaning and to create a sense of irony. Though the visuals and the words work together to express more or less the same meaning, they do not simply repeat each other. The images and words each add their own part to the meaning, drawing on the resources of each mode.

Ian also makes effective use of movement in his Prezi.  By employing a circular narrative pattern whereby he ends where he began, he focuses in on the process of becoming a cyborg even as he questions whether that is necessarily a positive development. In this way he seems to achieve the goals of becoming more aware of how technology has influenced his development as a writer and what it means to be digitally literate.