Web 2.0 Technologies and Rhetorical Action: Delivering Invention

Presenter: Brent A. Simoneaux
School Affiliation: North Carolina State University
Email:bsimone@ncsu.edu

Delivering Invention

 

Overview

The Project

• After conducting research, we aggregated all of our media representations using Prezi.com. We treated this space as a gigantic wall, tacking up newspaper articles, tweets, photographs, discussion board posts. This virtually infinite space helped us to arrange our materials, scale them, and in the process, discover relationships between and amongst them. Soon, relationships, convergences, ideas began to emerge through play.

 

• We simultaneously began drafting prose essays that explored the relationship/s between the media representations and their cultural and historical contexts. As we drafted, we continued to use our Prezi spaces to visualize multiple ways of arranging our essays, multiple ways our arguments could go. Our drafts were, of course, not perfect. But they gave us something a little more concrete to work with.

 

• After completing full drafts, we set about recasting them as oral presentations. These presentations were purposefully short, requiring us to hone in on what was most important. With the help of plasma screen televisions, we used our Prezi spaces as visuals and delivered our presentations to a small group of others.

 

• Using what we learned from composing and delivering the oral presentations as well as the oral feedback from others, we revised our first drafts. In this way, the process of oral delivery was not simply an afterthought, a final step. Instead, delivery became an integral part of continual invention.

 

Example Prezi Space

http://prezi.com/t3xwussm1huj/cultural-and-historical-perspectives-amy-bishop/
Feel free to explore this example Prezi space. I created this space alongside my students to explore media discussions surrounding Amy Bishop, a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who shot six fellow faculty members in early 2010. In its present form, the space is a snapshot of my own inventional process—the continual aggregating, positioning, arranging, and scaling of media. Through the interplay of invention and delivery, I began to see a common thread emerge: Where, if anywhere, does Bishop fit with historical and contemporary cultural representations of women and violence?

For More Information

• Prezi Help Site http://prezi.com/learn/ . This site provides helpful tutorials for working with Prezi.
• Laurie Gries and Collin Brooke's 2010 article "An Inconvenient Tool: Rethinking the Role of Slideware in the Writing Classroom" explores how we might use slideware more effectively for pedagogical purposes. Focusing primarily on PowerPoint, they provide insight into the connection between invention and delivery. Gries, Laurie E., & Brooke, Collin Gifford. (2010) An inconvenient tool: Rethinking the role of slideware in the writing classroom. Composition Studies 38(1), 11-28.