For Information Architecture, I designed a presentation using Prezi's Zooming Presentation Maker. In Information Architecture, our class examined information in several different contexts. We first looked at how language, one of the most popular vehicles of information, is structured to help people make meaning out of what they see, hear, and read. Metaphors We Live By (1980), by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, was both influential and helpful as it laid the foundation for many of the other things we would read later. From evaluating language, we then examined how technologies are created with certain values in mind. Later in the semester, we looked more specifically at information: how it is categorized and displayed visually. Our final project, using the Prezi Presentation Editor, is the culmination of this semester-long academic adventure.
 
        As I thought more about how I learned so much in the class, I kept thinking of the long nights spent talk to classmates on Twitter in which we would help each other through problems with the assignments. This led me to Etienne Wenger’s Community of Practice, which I found meshed nicely with my own experience this semester. I learned from the texts, from my teacher, but perhaps most of all, from the other students in class. When one finished an assignment, he or she would serve as a great resource to those who were finishing slightly later. Instead of finishing an assignment and forgetting about it, several people in the class went out of his or her way on Twitter to offer help and suggestions. Also, I learned that I learn by doing, by trying, and by failing. This idea has been immeasurably important to me academically and for this project.

    After all, Prezi is designed to be played as much as it is to be mastered. I have played with Prezi a lot, but I haven’t mastered it. But, I think I am proficient with it. As I played with Prezi further, I thought of the work we did in IA in a new light. It was a chance to put into practice the principles we had been discussing all semester long.
  
    I thought more critically about the information I put into the presentation. I thought even harder about how I would link one “slide” or “lexia” to the next. I think I like the term lexia better than slide as the former indicates a sort of malleable place among other pieces of a text, which does not have a discrete, aloof, place. Slides, I believe, are artificially segmented from the presentations they are intended to describe.
 
   
    Information Architecture comprises many topics and so I think it’s only appropriate that my poster designed to explain some of the ideas that informed our work in IA comprises many topics as well. My poster talks about Twitter and maps and fonts and color palettes and social learning with the overarching theme of metaphors being important to understand abstract principles. My Prezi, like many of the parts that constitute it, is essentially one big metaphor embedded with many smaller ones. But these metaphors help me understand my place as a writer within a complex ecology that includes the texts, technologies, our class, our teacher, and the MA program. While some writers shy away from abstractions, I believe these abstractions, these metaphors, as Lakoff and Johnson argue, are important to make sense of these esoteric ideas we come across in frequently in graduate school and in the real world as well.