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.

1- Sign up for a Prezi account (http://prezi.com/profile/signup/). Prezi is free as long as you don’t mind your presentations being made public. Private accounts are available for an annual fee.

2- Prezi works spatially, and not necessarily linearly, so it helps to come up with an overview map or plan. We created a Wordle (a word cloud or ‘tag cloud’ generator) of the last CIT Annual Report by copy/pasting the text of the report into Wordle, and tweaking the look of the Wordle a bit. We then saved the Wordle as a PDF file and imported it into Prezi.

3-Prezi currently has 8 designs/themes. Whatever you choose cannot be changed later. Text choices are limited to body, header, or bullet-point. This is limiting, but we found the limitation to be liberating in that we didn’t spend time thinking about fonts as much as word size and placement.

4-Prezi allows you to upload images and video via the Media control. Pictures can be zoomed into, but be careful – if you zoom too far into certain images, they’ll look blocky and pixelated.

5-After adding text and images, it was time to plan the Paths. Prezi’s ‘Paths’ allow you to set up the order of the presentation’s zooming and movement. Unfortunately, if you have several complicated paths, it can be difficult to make changes while you’re working (see picture below). We recommend printing out a copy of your ‘overview’ and planning your ‘path’ first.

6-When creating a path, users can click on individual pictures or chunks of text. Prezi will zoom to and adjust the view to center the text or picture. If you rotate a picture or text, Prezi will rotate the entire view to bring the text back into focus. This provides the opportunity to hide small chunks of text by making them really small and flipping them upside down. As long as you connect the Prezi Path to them, Prezi will reorient the view to show them.

7-At times zooming into text or images isn’t enough. What if you want to zoom to a few items (text+images in a layout)? Prezi has three different ‘Frames’ (a box, a circle and a set of brackets) that you can use to tell Prezi to reorient the view to whatever is in the frame (see image below). We created frames around words from the Wordle image to reinforce key concepts, or assist with the layout overall. (Here’s a little trick – set up the frames, connect your content by paths, then go back and send each of your visible frames down a layer. This effectively hides the light grey frame graphics from view, while still giving you control over placement.)

8-Prezi’s can be delivered on the web, embedded into a website (though this is not yet very robust), or downloaded and played from your own computer. Currently, you can choose to have a Prezi automatically move through the presentation at 2, 10 or 20 seconds per point on your path. You can also manually move through a Prezi by clicking on a ‘next’ arrow, or by clicking on a Frame, Image or Text.

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

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

blog entry at Google Operating System

“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).

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.

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