| This hermeneutic phenomenological study explores students' and teachers' lived experiences of digital media technologies in the classroom. Using PowerPoint as a touchstone, my research investigates how software selectively extends but also constrains what a student sees, experiences and has access to, and how it enhances but also shapes a teacher's representation and presentation of his or her knowledge, skills and values. PowerPoint sponsors a prescribed framework for staging knowledge: headings and bullet points for teachers to "talk to." This scaffolding tacitly informs how some teachers visualize and subsequently present their knowing in the lived space of the classroom. The PowerPoint slideshow, regardless of the kind of knowledge it frames, exercises a powerful sway over the teacher in moments of teaching, at times appearing as impenetrable obstacle, rather than as generative support to the teacher pursuing his or her sense of pedagogical tact.;The continued promotion of digital media technologies as neutral agents---a foundational belief or "posit" of our current ontological epoch---imperils the normative project of pedagogy by concealing the instrumental constructs they materialize. Alerting teachers to the invisible but formative inscriptions of digital technologies can develop a deeper appreciation for the complexities of today's classroom environment, as well as for the challenges students face in tomorrow's ubiquitous computing culture. More patient, critical research is called for to better understand the mediating influences of new media technologies in the classroom. Meanwhile, educators are well served by living more reflectively with digital technologies, attentive not only to what they do, but what they may undo; to what they say and what they cannot say. |
