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Posts Tagged ‘prezi’

Information Literacy in the Digital Age

17 May

At York we have something called the PGCAP – it’s basically certification all new academics have to go through, the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice. The Library runs one of the classes the academics can take, and this year I delivered it. The brief was to talk about what we do to make our students information literate, but actually what the academics on the course wanted to talk about was how THEY could become information literate… Luckily I’d put a little bit about this into the presentation – some useful tools for digital literacy.

Here’s the presentation I used – this, incidentally, took me not much time because it’s a Prezi template. They’ve put in a LOT of actually-quite-useful templates in of late, so have a look if you’ve not checked them in a while. It’s officially now much quicker to make a nice Prezi than it is to make a nice PowerPoint.

 

 

It turned out to be quite an enjoyable session – very informal and with lots of discussion (going both ways – I was soliciting their views as well as telling them mine / the Library’s). The feedback was very good, up a lot on the previous version of this session I’d been involved in. But I was really struck by how much the academics wanted to know about the tools themselves (when I described my ’6 essential tools to make your academic life easier‘ class I run for my 1st years, a few of the academics said that basically they needed to go on something like that) so as part of my role on the University-wide Learning and Teaching Forum, I’ve set up a workshop called ‘#EdTech: 9 useful educational tools, to engage, communicate and keep up to date in the academic environment’. That’s happening on Monday, so I’ll report back on how it goes.

It really does seem like the time is ripe for Library’s to run these kinds of sessions – the academic world is ready for it and understanding of how useful it might potentially be for them…

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Posted in Information Literacy, Information Professional Stuff, Presentations, Technologies

 

Repeat after me: host content externally, embed content locally

19 Apr

Reblogged from the Library Marketing Toolkit

Modern library websites now have ALL KINDS of content. Where there used to be lots of text and a few images, there’s now much more dynamic content. We’ve got presentations, videos, audio, even embedded documents. This opens up a great opportunity to reach more and varied people.

It is possible to host all this stuff on your own website. But why do that when you can host them externally, and just embed them locally? It will save you an enormous amount of bandwidth, but more importantly, it will make your content infinitely more discoverable. We can’t rely on people going right to the Library wesbite; we have to show up in their Google searches too.

As we all know, a lot of people don’t know what libraries can do these days. If we host our content elsewhere on the internet, we’re going to the people rather than relying on them guessing that the library might be the one to help. We’re showing up in their searches. We’re appearing on the platforms they frequent anyway. We’re boosting our reputation among other libraries.

If you host a video on YouTube it will get views from people browsing that platform, as well as the views it will get embedded in your library website. The same applies for images which, if they’re magnificent Special Collections images for example, you could put on Flickr in their own group, and embed them in the Library website (and why not set a up a Tumblr blog or a Pinterest board for them while you’re at it?).

If you have Prezi or Slideshare presentations these can be picked up and featured by the hosting sites, leading to an exponentially increased audience. The same goes for PDFs too – host them on Issuu.com (like the new case studies for this website) or Scribd.com and they look good, get a lot more use (because people know what they’re getting without having to open a file) and could become featured documents.

The Twitter for research PDF I recently uploaded to Scribd, to my organisation’s account, was seen by around 3,000 people in its first two weeks of publication, because Scribd featured it on their homepage. So it was very useful locally, because putting on Scribd meant we could embed it locally making it more useable for our staff and students. But it was also useful internationally because it helped our institution reach a large audience, as a provider of useful guidance in an emerging area.

And what about Library news – why write it on the library website itself when you can host it on a blog and embed the RSS feed on your own site? Basically anything you think of can be hosted externally, embedded locally. What this means is you are AMPLIFYING your content and increasing discoverability – essentially, the work you put into your resources is going to be more richly rewarded.

So, repeat after me! Host externally, embed locally

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Posted in LibMarketing reblogs, Library Marketing, Tech Guide, Technologies, Web2

 

Twitter for Researchers guide

12 Mar

At my institution we’re really stepping up our support for researchers, and I’ve been doing a lot of stuff around the Web 2.0 end of the spectrum.

I’m running a suit of workshops called Becoming a Networked Researcher, and I’ve been into departments to give taster presentations like this one:

We’ve also finally completed a guide to using Twitter for Researchers. It’s more a Twitter for Researchers actually, rather than the process of academic research itself (although that is possible). I’ve hosted it on Scribd in order to embed it on our web pages, and it got picked up and featured on Scribd’s homepage so that helped boost the number of views it has had, which is huge, relatively speaking – around three-and-a-half-thousand. Plenty of those have been from York researchers, which is great – they’ve given us a lot of positive feedback and ReTweets.

The guide took a surprisingly long time to do – the difference between knowing stuff and actually writing an ideal version of it down in a document never ceases to disappoint me… Adding examples took a while too. I couldn’t decide between very brief of very comprehensive – in the end I decided somewhere between the two, keeping it as short as possible but including a LOT of information. The idea is, if they want more, they can come to the Twitter workshop as part of the Becoming a Networked Researcher suite.

Anyhow, here it is – feel free to use stuff from it, with attribution:

Twitter for research by University of York Information

There’ll be some more University of York Library stuff on the blog shortly, around Digital Literacy, videos etc!

- thewikiman

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Posted in Presentations, Tech Guide, University of York Library, Web2

 

A book about Prezi

10 Aug

 

the cover of the book

Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations, by Russell Anderson-Williams, has just been released by Packt Publishing.

I have an interest in this, because I served as one of the two Technical Reviewers for the book. Check it out, I even get a little bio in there!

A bio, of me

 

About the book

As the name suggests the book is aimed at people giving business presentations – but basically all of it is applicable to anyone wishing to progress their Prezi skills to the next level. What I really like about it is it’s written by someone from a proper design background, so there’s a lot of technical stuff which is really handy if, like me, you quite like designing multimedia things but have no real idea what you’re doing. The sections on using audio and video are really good, and Russell certainly knows a lot of tips and tricks which were new to me. He really gets to grips with the potential of the software, and it’s very engagingly written.

About being a technical reviewer

The way the process works with this particular publisher, is that they send you each chapter basically as soon as it has been written. You’re encouraged to use the comments facility of Word to go into as much detail as you can, suggesting changes and improvements or highlighting the bits you think work really well. There’s also a questionnaire for each chapter, which includes questions like ‘what do you think the next chapter should be’ and so on. You send back the chapter and the questionnaire, they pass it on to the author along with the other reviewer’s comments, and then you get sent the next one or two chapters once they’re done.

It’s an odd process because you want to be doing a good job as a reviewer and actually making constructive suggestions, so you want to add as many comments as possible – but at the same time you don’t want to be finding fault where there is none, and the fewer comments you make the more complete the chapter is already, which is a good thing. So the balance is a hard one to find.

I was doing this around the same time I was finishing off my own book, and I have to say I would have found it very difficult to work like this – showing people what I’d done as I went along. I’m the kind of person who likes to have anything creative more or less complete before showing anyone – and that includes having all the chapters drafted, for context! Facet asked for one chapter early on in the writing process (to check I could actually write) but then let me get on with it thereafter till it was a completed draft. At this point they said they could send it off for proofing, indexing etc – or they could get it reviewed. I asked for it to be reviewed, and specifically asked if Antony Brewerton could review it; I’m really glad I did as the extremely helpful comments he came back with led me to actually restructure the book quite significantly, moving content around and adding some stuff in.

All in all reviewing this Prezi book was enjoyable. Sometimes I found it hard to turn around the work in the time the publisher wanted, and I never really had a sense if what I was doing was actually useful – I asked for feedback but I was told they’d be in touch if there were any problems, so hopefully that means there weren’t any. The best part of it was definitely getting to read a great book! There are loads of really useful tips I’ve adopted, and my recent Prezis are much better than my earlier ones because of it.

One thing is certain – I much prefer this kind of reviewing than critical reviewing for publication, and when I get asked to do that I always suggest someone else to take it on. Knowing what goes into writing a book means I could never really criticise anyone else’s knowing they might read that criticism, so a review from me is of no use to anyone…

 

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Posted in Books / eBooks / Digitisation, How To..., Presentations, Tech Guide

 
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