- Individual Presentation
Each of you will design a PowerPoint Presentation with a voice over. The presentation should last 10 minutes, so the cumulative time of your voice-over portion should be 10 minutes.
The presentation is to be submitted to the Blackboard a day before the presentation becomes available for the students to review. See the syllabus/schedule for the assigned topics and submission deadline.
Instructions for recording a voice-over:
- Create a PPT slide.
- Click INSERT.
- Select AUDIO from the drop-down menu
- Select Record.
Format, length, and content. Your presentation should last 10 minutes. It should be accompanied by a PowerPoint with the VOICE OVER.
The first page of your PowerPoint Presentation should have your name and your topic. In the end of your presentation you should summarize all the information on the Summary page. You also have to include a bibliography page. Note that you cannot just copy and paste the information from the sources without putting it in quotation marks. In other words, the text on your PPT should be your own. If you are using somebody else’s text, you have to cite it.
In the body of your presentation, you should discuss:
brief biographical sketch of the artist (if known)
formal qualities and stylistic characteristics of selected artwork,
the circumstances of its creation,
its function,
medium/material,
narrative content, and
its historical/cultural significance.
Please, consult outside sources to prepare a successful presentation, just make sure to cite your sources.
Discussion Questions. Each presentation should end with 2 detailed discussion questions about the image. The questions should not be factual, in other words, these questions should spark a discussion rather than prompt your peers to reiterate the facts.
For example:
Artwork: Venus of Willendorf
Factual question: Under what circumstances was this work discovered and where it is located now?
Discussion question: Due to the lack of written records, the scholars cannot determine the precise function and meaning of this work. However, they have advanced multiple theories. For example, it was argued that this work was a fertility idol (due to exaggerated body parts that are related to reproductive function); dolls (small scale), first self-portraits (particular angle as if the artist is looking down at her own body), or even prehistoric version of pin-up girls (taken by the male members of the tribe during the long hunting trips). Which of these theories do you find more plausible? Please, explain your position.
Discussion questions should be answerable, that means they should be based on the information from your presentation and should not require any additional research on the part of the students who are responding to your questions.
For example: Michael S. Bisson criticized the theory by Catherine McCoid and LeRoy McDermott that this type of prehistoric figurine was created as self-portraits. Do you agree with him? Explain your position.
Unless you have explained in your presentation Bisson’s critique, the students cannot really answer this question without consulting outside sources, which is not the point of this particular assignment.