I used Illustrator to not suck when I drew this

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon at Adobe with NMC CEO Larry Johnson. We talked with folks from Adobe’s higher education division, and we saw some really, really cool stuff. One thing that I loved is Adobe Rome (see the video demo of Rome from MAX 2009 last October). Rome is going to be a fantastic tool for K12 mediamaking and collaboration, I think. It makes it easy to pull together different kinds of media along with text and drawings, and then to output the project in different ways. I really want my son to play with it, because I’m curious about how the tool will feel to a young person. It looked very intuitive to me, but then I’ve been using Photoshop and Illustrator longer than my son’s been alive, so it’s hard to say how a new, inexperienced user would see it. The demo just blew me away because of what could be done with it in schools, if the Big 3 Issues are properly addressed (what does it cost? can I make the kids’ work private? do I need to install and maintain it?). I have high hopes.

We also saw some of the new features coming up in CS5, but I’m not sure which ones have already been revealed so I’ll just say this: Wow. I am so excited about what I saw. Photoshop in particular has some new powerful features that I look forward to playing with, and there are some other treats coming out as well. Keep an eye out for CS5 and Rome!

This is a concept that has been recurring in my research over the past few years, getting a little clearer each time but still not quite in focus for me. The role of the teacher, in some places, is changing. A whole set of factors are contributing to the change, including ready access to experts and source material through the great communications medium of the Internet; open content; electronic, searchable, taggable resources that make it easier to draw (and keep track of) connections between things; and a growing recognition of the fact that not only is it often better for students to participate in constructing their own understanding, it’s actually possible to facilitate that process on a classroom-sized scale.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Bossanostra

The 2010 Horizon Report returns to this theme, too, both in the topics (open content and electronic books in particular) and in the trends and challenges noted by the Advisory Board. Classrooms are changing. Students are changing. The role of the academy is changing. It’s very easy to say that different equals bad, and that the anecdotal inability of today’s students to sit still and receive instruction is a symptom of the moral decay of our great society, but I don’t believe that’s true. I think, instead, that we stand at the edge of an opportunity to transform education into something that truly addresses the interests and the strengths of each student, rather than measuring each against an abstract ideal. I don’t know what it looks like. I know it’s more challenging to work individually with 25 or 30 different kids, or 60 or 120 different undergrads, to help them figure out interesting ways to learn what you want them to know instead of presenting material to them as a group and expecting them to master it. But I also feel so strongly that it’s the right way to go, because learning should be more than something that’s fed to you in school. It’s part of what makes us human and it goes on all throughout our lives, and it’s not right that so many students just can’t wait for it to be over so they can get on with other things.

I think we’re poised on the brink of figuring this out — how to really do it well, I mean. I think technology has a lot to do with it, not for its own sake but because of what it enables students to do. We’re still working out how to provide access, manage workflow, protect students’ privacy while opening opportunities to reach out to peers and experts around the world; we don’t yet understand how to assign, supervise, and evaluate the unusual kinds of work that contribute to individual learning; and there are many other obstacles, or puzzles, to get around or solve. Still, I think we’re on the way there, and it’s inspiring and exciting.

These are the voyages of the ed tech speaker. Her continuing mission: to explore strange new presentation tools; to seek out new ways to keep her audiences awake; to boldly go where no PowerPoint has gone before.

I just finished putting together the presentation on the 2009 Horizon Report that I will be delivering tomorrow at Sonoma State University, where they are kind enough to ask me back every year around this time. Last year, I crammed at least 90 minutes of information into about 55 minutes, accompanying my speed talking performance with a respectable, if uninteresting, PowerPoint. Those poor people.

Later in the year, I gave a keynote at the Midwest Library Technology Conference 2008 along with my colleague Alan Levine. Spurred by a mutual desire not to use PowerPoint, we created the presentation in the beta version of VuVox, which was fun but a little frustrating because of a couple of bugs. (You can see that preso here.)

THIS year, what should drop into my lap but Prezi, a Flash-based presentation tool that I can only say is yummy. It’s also in beta, but Alan had a log in and said I could use it. (Thanks, Alan!) So, having prepared the back up PowerPoint just in case (I’m adventuresome, not stupid), I went in and started messing around.

Prezi gives you an endless (well, not really, but near enough) artboard, like Illustrator. There’s a lovable little menu, with a limited (but not really limiting) set of choices, that takes about twenty seconds to get the hang of. You drop your content on the artboard, and move it around; Prezi takes images and videos (flash only), and you can add text blocks. You group the content using “frames,” which helps with navigation. And that’s about all you have to master, except for the underlying concept that scale doesn’t matter.

Prezi will zoom in on objects or content groups when you click them, so your presentation can have a huge range of scales. I LOVED this once I actually got the hang of it. My first instinct was to lay everything out as though I were going to print it as a poster, with only the range of sizes that are visible all at once. But that doesn’t really take advantage of what makes Prezi so interesting. You can nest content areas, so one frame can contain multiple sections that are too small to see at first.

A finished Prezi can be used two ways: either you step through using the forward and back arrows (you set the path as you create the content, so you zoom where you want in the order you want), or you just click frames and objects that interest you. Either way, whenever you go from one thing to something that’s a different scale, Prezi zooms in or out, centers, and tilts whatever you are seeing so that you can read it.

What I really liked:

• It was incredibly easy to make something that looks really good.
• It was fun to use!
• It autosaves. You can save manually too.
• The zebra wheel lets you tilt, size, and move any object just by clicking it.
• The zooming and tilting looks really cool when you step through a presentation.
• Almost everything I wanted to do was do-able, and the stuff that wasn’t, wasn’t really necessary.

What I didn’t like so much:

• I could not find a way to attach a URL to an object. The only way I found was to type out the whole URL, and then that text becomes a link. But I wanted to link pictures and things.
• There are not many design schemes to pick from (yet?). I like the basic one, but I wanted a white background so I could hide the white background on some of my images. I had issues with transparent backgrounds (i.e. they didn’t work).
• I wanted to be able to choose my own set of fonts. You get three per design, which is perfect, but I wanted to change just one of the three in the design I used.
• Although there’s an option to download your presentation so you can play it without the Internet, it doesn’t seem to be working.
• Prezi spawns windows at an alarming rate. When I saved & closed my presentation, there were three Prezi parent windows open. I have no idea where they all came from.

On the whole, I have to say that I like it a lot. I used it for hours and was having fun the whole time. No angry frustration, no puzzled pauses, no “is-it-this-software-or-am-I-just-stupid?” moments. My professional, unbiased opinion is YAY-I-LOVE-PREZI!!

Take a look at the presentation. It’s text heavy, but I did that on purpose so that it can be used without me standing there talking.

You can try Prezi yourself, even without a beta account, by playing with their demo at www.Prezi.com. Go on. It’s fun. And work should be fun.

Now, if my iPhone could only do Flash, I could carry this around with me. I’d be the life of the party!

My toon, Ninmah, hit level six last night. Woo hoo! She’s well on her way to raising that 10g guild fee, too — I think she’s got more than two silver pieces! Oh yeah! So if you haven’t got your toon started yet, get in there and level up!

P.S. This slayed me. (Warning: Sluggy Freelance is addictive)

Yesterday’s vagueness had a lot to do with late-stage writer’s block. I was in the push-on-through-till-dawn phase of writing and wasn’t sure what else to say. There wasn’t really a single coherent question I could ask. The post, which ran as follows, was basically a cry for help:

The NMC is working on a paper that discusses what it means to have an impact on campus (for a new media center or similar organization). It’s sort of a how-to guide for directors of such centers, with suggestions about ways to make a difference on campus. We affectionately call it “Campus Impact.”

The material for the paper has come from several discussions with the directors of centers that belong to the NMC, so the suggestions are good, solid ones that people have actually employed, illustrated with examples. The paper covers seven strategies that can be used together to increase a center’s impact on campus:

• be focused
• be adaptable
• be productive
• make allies
• set expectations
• make your boss’s goals your goals
• be needed

Obviously the paper goes into a little more detail. It’s in a late draft stage at this point, but if you have ideas, I would love to hear them.

That said, the suggestions I did get were actually quite helpful. Thanks to Bryan’s example (The Studio at Colby College), I emphasized the role of students in making an impact. Nick’s point about leveraging campus networks is an excellent one, and found its way into the paper as well. Just the fact that someone out there expressed an interest in reading the thing gave me new energy as I tackled it (thanks Steve!). Of course, I also took a direct line of attack and walloped that writer’s block with some really good tea and top-of-the-line chocolate — desperate times call for desperate measures. All of this together got me past the hurdle.

I realize I still haven’t put in the “more information,” so here it is. The idea for the paper came out of several conversations among NMC directors (that is, people who run new media centers or similar organizations on various campuses). The directors were sharing stories about things they had done that had made a noticeable impact on their campuses, and asking each other questions about their stories. Victor Edmonds from UC Berkeley gave a presentation at the 2005 NMC Director’s Meeting based on his experiences running ETS; he’s the one that came up with the seven strategies, and the other directors really resonated with those ideas. In that session and in a similar one at the 2005 NMC Summer Conference, the directors explored those ideas some more, and swapped stories, concerns, and suggestions. Craftily, we took notes. (We told them we were going to, so it was crafty in the clever sense, not in the sneaky sense. In fact, I took notes on giant 4′x8′ sheets of paper, so it would have been really hard to be sneaky about it.)

We’ll share a draft of the paper at this year’s Director’s Meeting, which is next week (back to Texas for me — more travel stories for you), and use it as a springboard for further discussion of the topic. When the paper is finished it’ll likely be posted on NMC’s website, so I’ll include a link here for those who are interested.

As a proof-of-concept, though, yesterday’s post worked really well. You can be sure that the next time I’m stuck, I’ll be writing about it here. Thanks y’all!

Okay, first we’ll have to get to sixty, but that’s doable. Look for Ninmah on Runetotem (Alliance side) where I will be slowly building up the 10g guild startup fee. My main is on Khadgar, which is one of the closed realms, but I’m willing to start from scratch for a good cause.

Post your name here and I’ll keep an eye out for you. We can’t start the guild until we have ten, and so far we have two (I’m holding you to your word, Bryan, dialup or no). Roll call! Who’s in?