PowerPoint and the Pedagogy of Digital Media Technologies

Abstract

This hermeneutic phenomenological study explores students' and teachers' lived experiences of digital media technologies in the classroom. Using PowerPoint, the research investigates how software selectively extends but also constrains what a student sees, experiences and has access to, as well as how it enhances but also shapes a teacher's representation and presentation of his or hear knowledge, skills and values. PowerPoint sponsors a prescribed framework for staging knowledge. This scaffolding tacitly informs how some teachers visualize and subsequently present their knowing in the lived space of the classroom. The PowerPoint slideshow, regardless of the kind of knowledge it frames, tends to exercise a powerful sway over the teacher in moments of teaching, at times appearing as impenetrable obstacle, rather than as generative support to the teacher pursuing his or her sense of pedagogical tact. The continued promotion of digital media technologies as neutral agents -- a foundational belief or "posit" of our current ontological epoch -- imperils the normative project of pedagogy by concealing the instrumental constructs they materialize. New media technologies are more helpfully comprehended as "evocative objects" or "mimetic vehicles" that invite, scaffold, and sustain new practices and patterns of thinking, and thus carry significant "effective" as well as "affective" implications for students and teachers alike. More patient, critical research is called for to (1) reveal the intimate, co-constitutive relationships we share with different digital technologies, (2) articulate the mediating influences of digital technologies on classroom ecologies, and (3) understand the agency of technology's "hidden" curricula in our lives. Meanwhile, educators are well served by being attentive not only to what digital technologies do, but what they may "undo"; to what they "say" and what they "cannot" say. [For the complete volume, "Educational Media and Technology Yearbook, Volume 36, 2011," see ED597737.]