Popular digital semiotic technologies

‘Death by PowerPoint’ is a term from the title of the book by public speaker David Greenberg (2000), who was one of the earliest to use the phrase. The metaphor is immediately relatable to everyone who has to endure a boring slideshow presentation and the phrase has captured the imagination of many. When it comes to the use of digital technology in the classroom, Microsoft PowerPoint seems to be the popular semiotic technology that comes immediately to mind.

Emilia Djonov and Theo van Leeuwen, in their research on PowerPoint presentations, uncovered that the bullet points used prevalently in PowerPoint presentations were invented by a manager at Exxon Mobil (Djonov & van Leeuwen, 2014).They were first called ‘Korky Dots’ after his namesake, A.F. (Korky) Kaulakis. Korky recommended his colleagues to use bullet points to highlight key ideas in company presentations, and pitch sales messages more effectively. This was in 1958 in the context of business meetings in America. More than half a century later, the use of bullet points is now an integral feature in PowerPoint, used prevalently across situations and cultures.

Does it matter that PowerPoint was not designed for teaching and learning, but for selling in mind? Does the appropriation of a way of communicating in bullet points on PowerPoint presentations for selling yesterday to teaching and learning today work? How does this appropriation change the nature of pedagogic communication in the classroom? On a broader scale, this alludes to the market-isation of pedagogic discourse, as the ways of teaching and learning in the classroom become increasingly conformed to the nature in the discourse of economic transactions as similar semiotic technologies are used in both settings. A question for educators to ponder is what is ultimately gained and lost through the dominant use of PowerPoint as a semiotic technology in the classroom.

This is not to say that resources that are not designed for learning in the first place cannot be appropriated for pedagogical purposes. It is both impractical and perhaps also rather unimaginative to expect all semiotic technologies used in the classroom to be designed for teaching and learning, and if the argument is extended, to be customised for the particular students’ profile, ability level, and disciplinary subject. Building a customised tool from scratch will likely ensure that it serves the function it is built for, but such a decision usually involves trade-offs, in terms of cost, time, and sometimes quality.

From a social semiotic perspective, semiotic technologies, whether they have been designed for learning in mind or have affordances that can be exploited for learning, can all be used by skilful teachers as part of their repertoire of resources to design for meaningful learning experiences. It is ultimately about fitness for purpose. Nevertheless, regardless of whether the semiotic technologies have been designed for learning or whether they have been subsequently appropriated for learning, it is critical to reflect on their fit and value in communicating knowledge, enabling and enacting specific pedagogic relations between the teacher and students, as well as their contribution in organising the learning experience. Fundamentally, it is also critical to evaluate the value and cost for teaching and learning intrinsic to the semiotic technologies.

In this chapter, the reference to PowerPoint presentation is used to imply both the PowerPoint software and the PowerPoint presentation following the work of Zhao, Djonov, and van Leeuwen (2014), and Zhao and van Leeuwen (2014). In particular, the semiotic artefacts of PowerPoint software and PowerPoint presentation are ‘to regulate semiotic practices’ (Djonov & van Leeuwen, in press) in the dimensions of software design, software composition, and presentation. The latter two are the focus of the discussion in this section on PowerPoint as digital semiotic technology for learning.

The use of PowerPoint presentation, and by extension all semiotic technologies that predominantly represent and communicate knowledge through the teacher’s computer onto the projected big screen in the classroom, is that it takes up space. Simply put, the use of the screen can limit the space and scope for the use of other knowledge representations and in other ways. Materially, the screen in the classroom usually often occupies the centre front area of the entire room. When pulled down for use, it obscures much of the whiteboard space, and leaves little, and often no space to be used for the whiteboard. While the screen can be pulled up when it is not in use, the time and effort it takes for the teacher to set up the PowerPoint presentation to be used for the lesson usually deter any further meddling with the set-up, just in order to use the whiteboard. As such, it is not unusual to have teachers delivering the entire lesson using the screen as a main medium of communicating knowledge, and with that, a corresponding limited use of the whiteboard in the classroom.The central question remains: what is the value and opportunity cost in the use of a specific semiotic technology? The cost in the use of the whiteboard as a semiotic technology for teaching and learning will be discussed in the next section.