Thursday, November 5, 2009

Now Spreading the Prezi Love

I have never considered myself a PowerPoint hater...I use it at conferences, I'd like to think I can make a pretty dynamic PPT, and putting them on Slideshare for others has proven popular, at least I have a decent hit count. I work at a university where I get MSOffice for free, and while I have largely moved to Google Apps, I remain relatively content with PowerPoint, and haven't had much desire to move from it.

So what on earth would come along to make me tell you that I WILL NEVER MAKE ANOTHER POWERPOINT AGAIN?



Can I just say how much I LOVE Prezi? It's like having a table onto which you can dump the contents of your brain (and your document folders), arrange and rearrange your content, and then add a path to which you are not beholden to stick...jump (or let others jump) around as you/your audience please/s.

And again, 100MB of free space to create...the price is right! AND...once I have perfected my Prezi, I can download a self-contained Flashapp presentation that plays nice with any computer I use....or link out to it...or embed it wherever I like embedding things....

I like this one so much, I'm likely to upgrade this one to take advantage of the offline creator for use in our faculty development center.

Please share with me your Prezi stories...I can't be the only one out here who is smitten with this app!

Hey, you in the Ivory Tower: the Technology Gap is Real!

Do you really still think Prensky has been debunked?

Think again:

Use by Students and Faculty Members of Various Technologies in Conjunction With Education

Tool
Students
Faculty Members
Laptops
84%
69%
Course management systems
77%
60%
Social networking
52%
14%
Open source applications
31%
12%
iPod / MP3 player
31%
8%
Wikis
28%
11%

Hope and Hype is Always Better Than Hate

Remind me never to apply for a position at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. With a cyberstructure researcher who hates cloud computing and a CIO who hates Twitter, can you imagine how well RTB would fare there?

My favorite observation from the site (made me think of something Dr. Counts would say...which then made me cry):

...academics remain enormously hidebound about social utilities. I routinely hear academics who have never laid eyes on Twitter or Facebook dismiss them with would-be clever put downs based on sheer ignorance. Such people sound like nothing so much as medieval scribes grousing about the advent of movable type.