History, videogames, and Prezi
Apr 20, 2010 Education, public history
For the third year in a roll, I gave a lecture to a group of high school students visiting the University of Toronto. This year I returned to the lecture I gave two years ago on the myth and history behind El Cid. In the lecture, we start with a discussion of how El Cid is portrayed in popular culture as a larger-than-life Christian hero before turning to a quick run down of what we actually know of the life of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar and then end with an explanation of how the myth of El Cid was fashioned in the centuries after his death. It’s a fun lecture and this year I decided to move away from powerpoint/keynote and use Prezi instead. Check it out:
I have to say I quite liked using Prezi. It definitely solved the problem I had with how to properly combine images and text. I think it would work particularly well for presenting timelines as well as large images with annotations along the side.
Another interesting aspect of the lecture was hearing where students might have heard about El Cid. Of the 15-20 students in attendance, three had heard of El Cid. That in itself was not surprising. What surprised me most was to see that of those three, two learned about him from the videogame Age of Empires II. Which takes us back to the post I wrote two years ago when I first found out there was a videogame about the Cid.
Tags: lectures, videogames
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