In researching about Prezi, I have mentioned thewikiman already (blog post, November 2011), however I haven’t mentioned that I am a fan of his PowerPoint presentations, available via SlideShare. My favourite two are below:

Stop Breaking the Basic Rules of Presenting

How to use Prezi and win: thewikiman’s 10 top tips to make a good one

The only problem with doing learning resources on Prezi is that it updates so frequently that things get out of date really quickly. Or to look at it positively, Prezi is always improving and responding to user feedback. I have been working on a short guide for the Create Curate Collaborate! project but keep hesitating about when to complete it as it could be out-of-date quite quickly, or I could just re-issue new versions as Prezi do with their learning materials (see blog post with Prezi learning links).

We have “Death by PowerPoint”; “Death by motion sickness in Prezi” is an equally likely scenario.

This has not been an issue for me previously, but I have recently had a comment from someone about this effect of Prezi, which has actually caused them nausea for up to one hour after using the tool. We have set a plan in action in case this occurs with any of the students who are collaborating with us on ‘Create Curate Collaborate!‘, and we will be able to offer alternatives if the need arises.

Doing a bit more research into Prezi and motion sickness throws up the following recommendations:

• Prezi.com recommends using grouping and layering to reduce panning
• thewikiman recommends: tip #4 Position your materials sympathetically to avoid motion-sickness.

Although this makes a slight improvement, to be honest the Prezi motion is starting to irritate me, even when moving very slightly in a straight path from one identically sized object to another. These tips have also not solved the problem for my colleague at all.

springerspandrel from within the Prezi Community website has written a really good post about one month ago, about what needs to be done to solve the ‘bounce’ issue: Path trajectory (and zoom) options to reduce bounce and sea-sickness and I quote:

 ”pogo-stick” feel of the path animations

and

In general, the little “zippy bounce” effect along every bit of path (even between same-size nodes) is a bit too cutesy for me sometimes.

Sorry Prezi, but I have to agree. The great thing about Prezi is that they are constantly changing and evolving and respond to user requests much faster than any other presentation software programmes that I am aware of – so watch this space!

Google presentations upgraded in October (see blog posts under ‘Links’), and now has more features, including:

• Transitions to move between slides with simple fades or spicier 3D effects
• Animations to add emphasis or to make your slides more playful
• New themes to create beautiful presentations with distinct visual styles
• Drawings to build new designs, layouts, and flowcharts within a presentation
• Rich tables with merged cells and more options for adding style to your data

(Ref: ‘A fresh start for Google presentations‘)

What is interesting about these features is that they are apparently some of the most requested by users. Questions:

• Who are these users? what kind of demographic/background? how do they use Google Docs?
• Why did they choose these features? To make Google presentations more like PowerPoint? Delibrately or subconsciously?
• How did Google Docs select the ‘most wanted’ features?

The improved collaborative feature is what interests me the most; now character-by-character collaboration is possible, akin to that previously offered in Google Docs documents. Not only does this bring presentations up to the standard of the other Google Docs, but it also poses a challenge to Prezi as it could be argued that Google Docs is more powerful for collaboration than Prezi. I will be watching the development of Google Docs presentations and Prezi with interest.

Links

• Google Support: The new version of Google presentations
• Google Operating System blog: The New Version of Google Presentations
• Google Doc blog: A fresh start for Google presentations

This Prezi was a collaborative effort with my son: ‘V&A visit‘. The reasons for creating this were:

• explore the idea suggested by Jac about using Prezi to create a ‘journey of a visit’
• explore the idea suggested by Curtis about engaging my son with Prezi (why not!)
• potentially produce a template that could be used by the students if they would like to use it
• record our visit in order to document our project work and support the visit with the students in early February

William Morris Café at the V&A. Photo: MTG

Last week Jac and I met with Leanne Manfredi (Programme Manager: Higher Education and Creative Industries) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Jac and I talked about the Create Curate Collaborate! project and our plans for bringing students to the V&A to inspire their creative writing. The focus is on students as researchers, and considering the process rather than the end product. Students will have their own mapping of the V&A to work from, but will then be brought back together at different points, some of the ‘learning spaces’ that might work are:

1. Norfolk House Music Room
2. Clore Study Area

• Sandino, Linda, ‘News from the past: Oral History at the V&A’, V&A Online Journal, Issue No.2 (Autumn 2009) -

“meaning and understanding of the V&A through the personal stories of its curators”

• Bright Club -

“a collaboration between comedy promoters One Green Firework, music promoters Duel in the Deep and UCL, London’s Global University”

A recent event was held at the V&A on Craft: http://brightclub.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/bright-club-craft-27th-september-at-the-v-and-a/

• UNMAKING THINGS: A Design History Studio

“a creative space for exploring innovative approaches to the study of design and objects”

Actions: planning our visit with the students for early February, and we need to book a room for end of May now!!

Lessons Learned

• 60 seconds is a surprisingly long time – next time I would think of it in terms of 3 x 20 seconds (i.e. 3 pecha kucha slides)
• the best PowerPoint slides were simple –  even though people normally read PowerPoint slides whilst presenters are talking, the 1-minute focuses much more on the presenter and much less on the slide
• include an image and key contact detail e.g. URL or email address on the slide
• trying to get your point across in 1 minute means the focus is not on the information but rather on: 1. a hook OR something crazy to grab attention and be memorable – the stranger the better; 2. remembering to give your contact details

Unfortunately the process could only be recorded once as I only had one spare educational email address. I would have liked the screencast to be smoother, but hopefully it still gives an idea of the steps. Also the quality of the YouTube video is not very good (I didn’t see an option to choose the quality so this might just be what YouTube can handle?). At least some lessons learned anyway!

So, some Prezi tips from thewikiman that I found helpful:

• ‘Your URL changes when your title changes so make sure you have a title you’re happy with before you make the link public!’
• Link to JISC TechDis Web2Access report on Prezi Accessibility
• Using hidden frames to create a more interactive Prezi – I have used hidden frames but not really thought of Prezi in this way -see thewikiman’s interactive library map Prezi
• Really useful link about using Prezi in learning and teaching in the US – blog post by Hal Kirkwood, SLA blog, 16 May 2011
  Quote from the blog post:

  ‘It allows for a much deeper opportunity to create more conceptually interesting presentations. Students pay attention more…they are more focused on the material…they want to try it. Information literacy becomes more engaging using Prezi.’

The problem with my Prezi links…
I had already tried the usual exit and back to edit etc, but I think the problem was due to the long list of links – the top one in the list was fine but the rest weren’t hyperlinked. I solved it by entering a new text item for each separate link, although Prezi didn’t like the Twitter link at all, maybe because of the characters ‘#!’.

November 2011 – Colouring text feature

• Spooky, when Curtis, Jac and I last met in Brighton we were saying this would be a good (essential) feature, and so it is nice that Prezi now lets you highlight text and select a colour; previously each section of text had to be one uniform colour.

October 2011 – Path thumbnails

• My favourite new feature – instead of having to play in show mode to check you have the right bit captured in the frame or path, you get to see thumbnails at the bottom showing the progression. The best bit is, that as with all Prezis, you are not limited to the path and can always go ‘off piste’ and then return to the path if useful.

September 2011 – Prezi templates

• This makes it very fast to create a Prezi presentation. The positive side maybe that more people get engaged with Prezi; the downside maybe that Prezi presentations become more uniform and similar. I am working on improving my latest Prezi which started off with one of their templates. This is very much a work in progress (Kaptur Prezi).

Links

• Original presentation abstract for ‘Changing Light’ 2010
• Final peer-reviewed version of written paper for ‘Changing Light’ 2011 (PDF)
• Additional published papers available freely here: UCA Research Online MTG Outputs