Wikiwhat?

Is anything ever really free...? With my copyright head on, I can't just click through terms and conditions with no qualms... so when signing up for a free PBworks account in order to test out wikis, I felt compelled to try and take in some of the T&Cs, wondering what am I really signing up to. If they're providing this for free, is there actually a catch? Who's actually responsible for my data 'in the cloud' - who's keeping it safe and who else can access it? I think all these new resources and tools are great, but does their ease of use inhibit us from actually thinking it all through? For instance, I quickly came across the proviso that the free version of PBworks must be used not for profit - maybe common sense, but really important to know...



I have used the wiki on the Portal and found that fairly intuitive, so was disappointed to find this not so intuitive with PBworks. I seem to have spent ages just trying to add a new page and see a structure to my fledgling wiki. However, I've used the wiki in the Portal pretty successfully, and found that a really useful tool for logging information that our team needs to share but that changes - so stuff it's not worth writing a procedure on but is good to have documented in a share space - more like rolling news or an online noticeboard. For instance there are bits of information about certain publishers and exceptions to the CLA excluded works list which periodically change and it's useful to have the info somewhere for us all to add and refer to.

Having now added my blog to the UK library blogs I feel exposed! It was exposing enough, knowing that other library colleagues might see, but anyone anywhere?! Even though it's unlikely that people will look it feels a big step to actually publish a personal blog. I can see how it would be easier doing it from the point of view of publicising a service. Registering has prompted me to try looking at others blogs again, which has definitely been inspiring... and I resolve to try to be less perturbed by my lack of progress and more positive! 

Slideshare

It seems to me that the value of slideshare is the quality and relevance of the slideshows contained within it. I wonder if the more interesting/engaging presentations have less information in them... therefore making them less useful when discovered in such an arena. I really like the way that most people now use a lot of images and not so much text in presentations, and it seems like good practice is to convey much of the information orally with the slides as simply another input to keep people interested. However this has the disadvantage that when you look at the slideshow in isolation it may not actually tell you very much. So I think the value of accessing presentations via slideshare depends on what the presentation has been designed for and what the user's requirements are. I.e. if it's visually strong and text light then it may not work stand alone, unless it's very conceptual and intended to stimulate ideas perhaps. But it could work well as a refresher for a presentation you attended yourself. So if you missed the presentation, then in this case how much will the slideshow help you?

I think in terms of teaching support materials and online learning the slideshow needs to be able to make sense as standalone materials and then it really does rely on the right mix of text and visuals, so people don't lose interest. I have found it useful to be able to look at people's presentations online after I've been to them in person as part of the process of consolidating learning, so is there an advantage to posting them online rather than them being emailed round? Well I guess not having large files clog up your email... but also looking at the related slideshows could help with expanding learning, even just to the general level of who's talking about what in a certain field, getting to know the big names to watch.

Google docs

Too tired today to try and think of a pun for the title... Following the crash course in productivity tools I thought I'd try and explore Google docs a bit more. I have had to use this for some collaborative work before and as I hadn't had an introduction felt a little nervous - I was unnerved by not having the option of saving but having to trust that it happened automatically. Also I didn't like the fact that there was no organisation, just a long list of documents. I have just discovered that I can put docs into collections, but it annoys me that they still appear in the long list, meaning the sense of overwhelm is not avoided. I think I also remember it being said that you couldn't share files that are in collections?

Finding google forms quite useful and it occurs to me that the job I've recently done of co-ordinating the requests for work shadowing could have been done more easily if I had a form for requesters. This would have saved me time finding out and collating information. So I drafted a form I could try and use if I co-ordinate this again. Having come out of it I now can't work out how to get the url of it to post it here! Also, occurs to me I could use this to get people to sign up for a training session on Moodle I'll be organising and perhaps use the form to ask people in advance what they want to get out of the session.  Hhhm, but what do I think of the caution in Katie Piatt's blog against using it for secure or personal data? Does anything with people's name count? That would rule out both my intended uses! With my counsellor's background I am a bit cautious about anything to do with confidentiality.

I also had a tiny experiment with google presentations. It was a joy to discover another option. In my self employed capacity I have been planning a presentation using my home PC's antique version of PowerPoint, then trying to do it in open office as I was worried about not being able to open it at the training venue, then realising I probably couldn't open it there if they don't have open office installed. So the potential to access my presentation at a different venue without having to know what software they may have on their computers was a welcome relief. I found the presentation tool fairly easy to use but was perturbed by the fact I couldn't see an option for printing the presentation with my notes included, this would make it actually pretty difficult to use the presentation as you can only see a tiny portion of the notes on the screen. As ever, I can't tell if this is me being inexperienced or whether this is a limitation.

Killing three birds with one Prezi

After an absence of a whopping six months I am attempting to return to this blog! I'm not sure if anyone else will ever see it, but it will at least get me to reflect on some of my development activities in a focused way. With the introduction of the CPD hour, my desire to recommence the 23 things programme and being asked to do an introduction to digitisation for the graduate trainees, I thought I would kill all those birds with one stone by trying out Prezi!

For my first experience of using Prezi I certainly found it time consuming, and it did take me quite a while to get used to the different way of using it. I'm still not sure how some of the things I've seen are achieved and this probably means I need to spend more time, look at the help guides or talk to other people. I am noticing that my learning style can be to be impatient and insular! On the upside I'm fairly pleased with what I produced. I love the fact that Prezi already has its own bank of images to select from. I had already started thinking a bit more out of the box in terms of what images to use for presentations following week 3 but this presentation cemented that. Still not totally sure whether I needed to use any acknowledgements with the Prezzi images I used though?

What I especially liked about using Prezi is that it got me out of my linear logical mindset and into a more visual creative space. Last year when devising a PowerPoint on digitisation I tried to get all the slides to summarise the main points in words, which actually made the presentation a bit dull. Whereas this time I used many more images and minimal wording on the screen just as prompts and fleshed everything out verbally in the presentation. I really quite like the look and feel of the presentation which was achieved with minimal expertise just using Prezi's own image bank and a template. I tried to use a template organogram type thing they had but basically had to deconstruct it to get it to fit my purpose, so some of it was quite fiddly. I would benefit from enhancing my knowledge on how to manipulate images in other programmes, as I had screen shots I wanted to use but couldn't work out how to upload them as images without the whole word doc appearing.

I have tried to refresh my memory on inserting images from creative commons - to no avail as the urls aren't working. So you will have to imagine a picture of a bird at the top and I will have to investigate further!