Click here to return to my main portfolio page.
For my Presentations badge, I submitted the final segment of a four-part video series I made at/after the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication.
For the series, I interviewed four rhet/comp scholars (three at the conference, one after) about the use of media in scholarship and pedagogy. Among the broad questions I posed were these: “As compositionists, what different media and technologies do we use in our conference presentations? In our classrooms?” “What opportunities for invention—for thought, for writing, for multimodal composing—do these media open up?”
In the fourth video, I focused my questions on presentational media (mostly Prezi and PowerPoint), asking how my interviewees saw these media being used and abused in both classroom and conference settings. In order to illustrate the interviewees’ points, I made both a PowerPoint and a Prezi, then used the screen-capping software Camtasia to capture the two presentations as video files. I then juxtaposed them with voiceover from the interviewees, focusing particularly on PowerPoint’s emphasis on linearity and Prezi’s emphasis on spatial relationships between ideas. The interviews themselves were mostly recorded using the DWRL’s Canon Vixia and a Rode video mic run into a Zoom H4N. I produced them in Adobe Premiere CS5 and captioned using MovieCaptioner, both of which were available to me on the lab’s computers.
For the most part, I learned to work with these technologies (hardware and software) in Justin Hodgson’s course Rhetorical Invention in an Age of Multimedia. This video series served as my final project for that course.