Cool

Presenting Prezi

I was reminded on Friday by the ever-innovative LSE Careers Service that I never shared my attempt at using Prezi, so here it is. I’d seen it used at a couple of events earlier in the year so when I was preparing for this year’s new academics induction I thought I’d give it a go for my Social Software in Teaching slot.

While it’s nice to sit in a presentation where PowerPoint doesn’t feature I’m not wholly convinced by Prezi. My main gripe is that I found it incredibly fiddly to use. It took me a long time to put this together, OK it was my first attempt, but I’m not sure it was worth it. The main advantage it seems, putting the occasionally sea-sickness inducing animation aside for now, is that it doesn’t need to be a linear presentation. It’s very easy to jump around and as most of my presentation could have been in any order I let the audience decide!

The LSE Careers Service Prezi I saw on Friday is below.

November 9th, 2009|Events & Workshops (LTI), Images, Audio & Video, Social Media, Teaching & Learning|2 Comments|

Google Wave for e-learning

Something that’s come to my attention very recently is Google Wave – Google’s reinvention of e-mail/instant messaging/collaborative editing/blogging/discussion boards etc. into one combined platform. The name still sounds a bit ominous to me, you’ll know what I mean if you’ve seen the film “Die Welle” – I was initially concerned that Google would be trying to route all forms of conversation through its servers for advertising targeting purposes. However, my fears are tempered for now as it seems that Google Wave will be a completely open source platform that can be installed on any server. Apparently no messages need to go near a Google server, but I guess we are still at the early stages of its development and implementation.
Looking at the announcement video (embedded below or available from the Google Wave website), the concept does look very impressive and I can see all sorts of potential benefits for elearning and academic research. Especially, if the server side technology can be hosted in house. The first 30 minutes of the video are enough to get an idea of what it does and how it works. Alternatively, Wilbert at CETIS provides a more thorough description of the technology and its potential applications, advantages and disadvantages.

June 11th, 2009|Blogging, Social Media, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

LYX

Have anyone across this? It is a kind of word processor, designed for scientists but produces teX files. So complex equations can be copied and pasted into moodle. It also says it is good for producing structured documents like reading lists

Lyx

From the link above

“LyX is for people that write and want their writing to look great, right out of the box. No more endless tinkering with formatting details, ‘finger painting’ font attributes or futzing around with page boundaries. You just write. In the background, Prof. Knuth’s legendary TeX typesetting engine makes you look good.On screen, LyX looks like any word processor; its printed output — or richly cross-referenced PDF, just as readily produced — looks like nothing else. Gone are the days of industrially bland .docs, all looking similarly not-quite-right, yet coming out unpredictably different on different printer drivers. Gone are the crashes ‘eating’ your dissertation the evening before going to press.

LyX is stable and fully featured. It is a multi-platform, fully internationalized application running natively on Unix/Linux and the Macintosh and modern Windows platforms.”

Not tried it yet but the screen grabs are very impressive. It could be useful.

June 4th, 2007|Teaching & Learning|2 Comments|

Because I can…

Herve and I are on the train to Nottingham… nothing to report yet but posting this because I can! feel like I’ve moved into the 21st century – I’m liking this new Vaio and wireless malarky!

March 29th, 2007|Blogging|2 Comments|