Southerner in a Cold, Cold Land

Here, I’ve used Google Documents to create an interactive PowerPoint presentation exploring the cultural and historical narrative traditions presented in Gerald Vizenor’s book of poems titled Spring in the Summer. Given the challenge to make a PowerPoint presentation more interactive than it already may be, I attempted to add some closing questions for the audience to consider. Specifically, I’ve asked them to think of examples of other texts that similarly develop and embellish cultural and narrative traditions. I’ve also included links to a couple websites that I thought might improve engagement further (respectively, a link to a Wikipedia page about the author and a link to a Google Book Search result that allows users to preview the literature). Given the chance to make further changes, I might provide links or footnotes to more challenging vocabulary within the presentation.

This document is publicly viewable at the following url: http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dc9nvfpn_22fvdbbnfn

Personally, I don’t think that a PowerPoint presentation is particularly interactive unless its author and audience can have a relatively synchronous back and forth of dialogue. I understand that if the presentation cannot be made live by its author or an expert, then an audio explanation of the presentation might serve to improve audience interaction with the text. For that matter, an engaging audio file of any written text might improve engagement among many readers/audiences.

It’s interesting to recognize how useful Google Docs is as a tool for peer review of finished and unfinished texts. Ease of use facilitated by intuitive design makes this a worthwhile program to take advantage of in numerous professions including those related to the field of Education.