I read “Ghosts in the Modern Classroom” by Ashley Hinck who argues that templates found in Word and Power Point and so on are limiting students abilities to be creative and experimental. The current education system teaches students how to follow simple steps and that there is always a right or wrong answer. As a results, students have false expectations on what digital media making is really about. With the addition of platforms that have templates and limitations, the assumption is digital media should be quick, easy and effortless. The reality is digital media making is complex with no simple path to follow nor any right answer. Students are now scared of making mistakes and so have more difficulties with being creative and thinking outside the box.
I agree with the author in that some platforms do limit creativity and causes students to have unrealistic expectations. Templates give students an easier way to make presentations in that they don’t need to worry about formatting. Also, for some platforms, only a limited component of the website is free which can limit how students can use the website. For instance, Canva has some free elements and others that cost money.
For my artifact, I chose to do an infographic by using Canva which summarizes some of the main messages she pointed out. I thought Canva was a great platform and fairly user friendly. From using this platform, I believe the main factor that inhibits student’s creativity is that they may not know how to use the platform to its fullest. There were some things I wanted to add but couldn’t figure out how to do it or how to do it for free. So, I didn’t necessarily have the tools or resources to be creative simply because of the limitation of my own knowledge with this platform. I also attempted to not use a template to see how limiting the platform was and found that with some practice, students are able to use their own imagination by using this platform.
However, from my experience, whenever I did presentations, the goal wasn’t to have the most creative power point or poster. The purpose is to have your topic be clear and interesting. Using templates for me was more of way to save time because making something from scratch is extremely time consuming. Coding is an extremely difficult skill that takes a very long time to master. I know people who took computer science courses in university and struggled trying to solve the assignments. For that reason, it may not be realistic to have all students code websites or infographics and so on. The students will simply not have the time. Perhaps there should be a compromise between taking a template and having to start something from scratch to enable students to be creative, understand there aren’t any specific steps to follow and prevent them from feeling like a failure when they can’t do something on their first try.
For that reason, perhaps the templates aren’t really the problem but the fact students simply don’t know how to use the platforms to their full potential which therefore limits how creative the students can be.