Reflection on the contrasts between working in Prezi and working on papers

I think the biggest difference between planning a paper and planning the prezi was the crazy drawing and scribbling it took to organize the prezi.

I started with a list of the documents and ideas I wanted to include in the prezi.  Then I tagged the documents in my list according to applicable themes, to see how I could arrange them. Chronological didn’t seem appropriate, because the themes didn’t flow linearly and that arrangement would mean bouncing between the themes. Some of the documents drew on more than one of the themes, so I redrew the arrangement to try to group the documents close to the themes I would be calling out in the text.

My husband peered over my shoulder when I had the prezi screen zoomed all the way out and open to the “path” function and said it looked like modern art.  I agree.  The order of my presentation looked like a big, messy spider web.

One tries to make a paper flow from one thought to the next, very efficiently progressing in a single direction. Prezi seems to encourage the user to discard the linear thinking we often associate with persuasive presentations (and the PowerPoint/sales pitch organization strategy) and makes it OK to revisit a screen or text block. For me, that was a new way to think about conveying information.

Had I not had “permission” to bounce from one era to another because I was approaching the ideas instead of the dates of the documents, I would have arranged the presentation differently. I would have probably focused on chronological organization, and tried to lead the viewer through it from that perspective, instead, even if it didn’t make the recurring themes as obvious.