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.