Like most 20th-century-born lecturers, I continue to think Powerpoint is cutting edge. It’s a subliminal but still powerful notion. Our teachers fiddled with overhead projectors and VCRs, and now we have every image imaginable, coupled with slow-populating YouTube clips, at our fingertips. I show a nibble of The Name of the Rose for Erasmus’s comedies, and the opener to Triumph of the Will to show a godly dictator descending from the clouds.
But as the readings for Module 5 remind me, Powerpoint is by now passé. And so is Prezi. Today’s experiments are no longer about how to engage students as passive listeners, but how to engage them in the act of history-making. This was the premise of “historical thinking” in the 2000s, and it’s the same one that digital humanities initiates have brought to assignments and assessments. I, for example, just gave my students a choice ten days ago. For their second paper, they can either write 1800-2000 words, or they can make a 10-minute Spark Video–both in response to the same question. I’ve since learned that Spark maxes out at around ten minutes. And I’ve confirmed what I anticipated, but didn’t have the time or experience to outmaneuver. The medium is too different from a traditional expository paper for students to know what they’ve produced is sufficient, and the same for me. In short, what can a Spark Video do that a paper can’t, and what can’t it that a paper can?
What I learned from the readings is that digital story telling is best suited to visual sources and phenomena. The Spark Videos that I’ve seen show lots of text, in excerpts from the assigned books, and a few token images taken from Adobe’s catalog. But the deft editing seen in the GMU projects is missing–there isn’t the time. And so is the weighing of contrary evidence and counterarguments that I require for all papers. There is no reason why this can’t happen in a video. But what is the visual that can not only accompany but advance that argument? That remains an open question.
I’m not yet sold on the intellectual rigor of digital story telling, but I’m curious to experiment further.
