At our recent Instructional Technology Showcase, we created a presentation to celebrate CIT’s ten year anniversary using a new web-based presentation tool called Prezi. Prezi allows users to create a presentation with several levels of magnification – so instead of moving from one slide to the next, you can zoom into areas of the presentation for more info. In contrast to a standard PowerPoint presentation, a Prezi provides opportunities to create a more interactive, contextual and dynamic presentation.

I’ve embedded a YouTube video of the CIT Prezi below.

You can watch the Prezi in full screen by visiting our presentation here. NOTE: After it loads, click the right pointing arrow to move through the presentation. Holding down the right arrow will open options to automatically move through the slides (if we can truly call each zone of a Prezi a ’slide’) at intervals of 2, 10 or 20 seconds a slide. To start the presentation over, hold down the left pointing arrow and choose the looping arrow icon.

Creating the CIT 10th Anniversary Prezi

For a quick overview of the process involved with building a Prezi, I’ll walk through the steps we went through to create the CIT 10th Anniversary presentation.

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This invitation came to Duke CIT, so I’d like share it with the rest of campus.

Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology
a state-wide digital arts and humanities festival
in February 2010

Join us, faculty, staff and graduate students! The UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH) will host a series of planning sessions to begin shaping collaborative projects that will be showcased at the CHAT festival. The festival is designed to jump start movement into digital arts and humanities by commissioning work from faculty, staff and graduate students at UNC, Duke University, North Carolina Central University and North Carolina State University. If you’re interested in working on a digital humanities or arts project, come explore the possibilities for collaboration and support.

****** Participate ****** Engage ****** Experiment ****** Create ******

Opening Conversation
August 22 / Friday / 2-4 p.m. at Hyde Hall Incubator (2nd Floor)
> Find out about resources and schedules, and meet potential collaborators
> Bring your ideas, questions and interests

Working Sessions
September 5 / Friday / 12-3 p.m. at Hyde Hall Incubator (2nd Floor)
September 6 / Saturday / 10a.m.-1 p.m. at Hyde Hall Incubator (2nd Floor)
> Share ideas, resources and skills
> Start to collaborate with people who share a common interest
> Lunch provided by the IAH

If you will attend, please RSVP and indicate which events you plan to attend: chat@unc.edu.
The participating units in planning and staging CHAT include the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), Carolina Performing Arts, the Ackland Art Museum, The Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), the UNC Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development, Wilson Library, UNC Information Technology Services (ITS), and the UNC Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services (OASIS).
Can’t make it to any of these events? Don’t worry–we’ll continue to host events and provide opportunities for collaborations in the coming months. To stay informed, visit www.iah.unc.edu, where we’ll post festival updates and announce the launch of the CHAT festival Web site.
Directions to Hyde Hall are available on the IAH Web site: http://iah.unc.edu/about/reserve-hyde-hall/contact/directions/directions

On August 4th, 2008, and again on August 6th, Alliance Library System, in cooperation with LearningTimes, will offer a one-day conference exploring the possibilities of using virtual worlds to teach literature. The conference, entitled “Stepping into Literature: Bringing New Life to Books through Virtual Worlds,” will be held entirely in the virtual world of Second Life. Participants will take take part in a virtual book discussion, and take field trips into literature-based locations that have been created in Second Life.

Keynotes:

Beth Ritter-Gluth (Desideria Stockton in Second Life) will be the keynote speaker and her talk is on “A Vision for Making Literature Come Alive in Virtual Worlds.” She is the creator of “Literature Alive in Second Life” and teaches English and Women’s Studies at Lehigh Carbon Community College in Schnecksville, PA.

The keynote author is Kim Rufer-Bach who will speak on “Using Virtual Worlds to Promote Real Life Literature.” Kimberly is co-author of “Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Advanced Content Creation for Second Life” (Sybex, October 2007) and is currently at work on “The Second Life Grid: The Official Guide to Communication Collaboration, and Community Engagement.”

Full conference schedule and registration information is available at the conference website, http://www.steppingintovirtualworlds.org

Or register now at: http://tinyurl.com/6ba6nq

Cost to attend is US $65 per person. For group rates (5 or more) write to john@learningtimes.net

YouTube, the popular and ubiquotous video sharing website, has added a new annotations feature.  After uploading a video to the site, you can now add “pop ups” with text that point to or highlight parts of the video frame to add commentary or additional information for viewers.  The annotations can be turned on or off by the viewer; the feature only works with videos at YouTube, not those embedded at external websites.

blog entry at Google Operating System

An Ars Technica article titled “YouTube University gets failing grade from prof, students” provides an interesting account of Pitzer College professor Alex Juhasz’s media studies course she decided to hold entirely within YouTube. Juhasz’s experience is no doubt very ‘meta’, in the sense that she’s teaching media studies, and the course in question was called ‘Learning from YouTube’. She addresses this in her analysis of the course (note, I added the bold emphasis, not her):

“I did set forth the rule that all the learning for the course had to be on and about YouTube. While this constraint was clearly artificial, and perhaps misleading about how YouTube is used in connection with a host of other media platforms which complement its functionality, it did allow us to become critically aware of the constraints of its architecture for our atypical goals of higher education. Thus, all assignments had to be produced as YouTube comments or videos, all research had to be conducted within its pages, and all classes were taped and put on to YouTube. This gimmick, plus a press release, made the course sexy enough to catch the eye of the media, mainstream and otherwise, allowing for an exhausting, but self-reflexive lesson in the role and value of media attention within social networking.”

Juhasz then continues with some observations about the overall outcome of the course:

“…students quickly realized how well trained they actually are to do academic work with the word—their expertise—and how poor is their media-production literacy (there were no media production skills required for the course as there are not on YouTube). It is hard to get a paper into 500 characters, and translating it into 10 minutes of video demands real skills in creative translation, or artful summary, within word, image, sound, and their layering.“

Juhasz also writes about the imperative of YouTube videos to be quick and entertaining, and thus, force her as a teacher to uncomfortably try to be entertaining as well:

“While I have always been aware that I am a performer, entertaining my students while sneaking in critical theory, avant-garde forms, and radical politics, much of what I perform is the delight and beauty of the complex: the life of the mind, the work of the artist, the experience of the counter-culture. I am not interested teaching as a re-performing of the dumbing-down of our culture. “

Many of Juhasz’s reservations and criticisms certainly have merit, though looking at her course’s page also reveals that many of her students began to produce slightly more rich media presentations over time -some of them actually quite fascinating.

Link to the course/group space on YouTube

Link to Alex Juhasz’s YouTube space

CIT is no stranger toYouTube – we’ve posted pages about it and even used it (and Flickr) to document our annual Showcase. We’ll continue to be available to help faculty think about uses of digital video and yes, even YouTube, for teaching, as digital video continues to factor more heavily into higher education (see, for example the upcoming DDI programs for 2008-2009).

“It’s like a photo, but it moves!”

Flickr, the popular service for sharing photos, has now added video capabilities to the site. The video uploads aren’t intended to replace or duplicate YouTube – the length is limited to 90 seconds – but as a way to augment user image collections with short videos taken with their digital camera. For example, users might have a photo set devoted to an event and the video would give a short interview or footage that gives a flavor of what the event was like. Videos can also be embedded in web pages or blog posts, similar to YouTube content.

Sample videos from the Flickr beta group

Article at techcrunch on differences between FlickrVideo and YouTube

Blog post with thoughts about the service

Description from the Voicethread website:

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways – using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) – and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.

You can share and comment on video as well as pictures and documents! What a powerful collaborative tool! Watching the samples on the website is a great way to generate ideas for using this tool. You can embed the “voice thread” on your blog or webpage (even your Blackboard course site), making any site a group collaboration site.

Thanks very much to Lucy Haagen and Donna Hall for telling me about this, and Shawn Miller for remembering what it is called! Please try it and tell me what you think.

Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium has posted a list of more than 50 different Web 2.0 tools that can be used to tell stories in digital form. He provides variations on a single story for each tool, along with some additional examples for many cases. This is a great list to explore to get ideas of how different tools might be useful, accompanied by some tips for generating story topics, using media and preparing your project.

List of 50 ways (plus a few extras) to tell a story using Web 2.0 tools
Slide show of Levine’s conference presentation that is the source of this list