Playing around with Prezi.com here but also trying to capture what I think is an interesting shift in the way we learn about, gather and share news these days. Comments on form and content both welcomed.
(For a little bit clearer version visit the Blip.tv page.)
Very nice, I found Prezi after your first tweet about it and I have been playing around with it for a presentation I have coming up in March. I like the way you used the frames and I may have to make some changes to mine to include the frames. Still playing with it. Thanks again!
Well done Will. I agree that this is a good example of how the communication of information surrounding current events has changed. Might have also been interesting to chronicle how quickly an item was created (and corrected/edited) on Wikipedia, although I guess that has already been done a few times with other events. Enjoyed the prezi, and the info.
I found the content here fascinating. I rarely watch videos on blogs (I can read faster than I can watch and I have limited time) but this really needed the video to tie it all together so well. That said, I’m not sure I’m sold on Prezi yet. I found the transitions fairly distracting.
Wow! That is a really neat tool. Thank you for taking the time to share it with us. At a time when the attention of many teens is captured by TV and video games, I can see how a presentation like this could hold the attention of some of those students better than the simple powerpoints that many teachers might use.
;0) You have no fun, Gary.
lol – Gary Stager and I are two different people.
Whoa! Greg! So sorry! (Red faced.)
Will – great use of Prezi! I was looking at it the other day and was trying think of how it could be used and I thought you did a great job.
I did a podcast last Thursday about my experiences following the news of the crash while it was happening and I was sitting in the waiting room of the shop and my car was getting fixed. I was following it on Twitter through Andy, and then soon after by Janis via his picture. It was incredible to be watching the mainstream news on TV and then following the same story on Twitter with reports from someone who was there as it happened.
If anyone is interested in my experiences the podcast is over at my blog : http://speakingofhistory.blogspot.com/2009/01/podcast-167-twitter-social-media-and.html
Thanks Will. The use of social media continues to amaze me and I wonder what the next couple of years will be like as more people use these tools on a regular basis.
Eric Langhorst
I remember in 1995 when I was 10 years old, how amazed everyone was that a website was able to post updates on the Oklahoma city bombing every 5 minutes. It is really amazing to me to see how dramatically that early promise has come to fruition.
Nicely done. I find the content better than the context which is a real tribute to you and your news background. I think that one of our roles as teachers is to model just as you have done the use of tech tools in the service of larger themes. My greatest worry is that we might become short-sighted in teaching the tool instead of the purpose behind it. I think the skill of filtering this river of info has always been important. Will demonstrates exactly how important it is.
You probably don’t need to be told this, but this is part of the intellectual heritage that you are already passing onto your children perhaps without even knowing it. Good work.
I found this quite solid proving the point that you make about the participatory nature of news today. I have one question though. You make use of numbers, so many thousands comments on the facebook page, so many fans, etc. It sounds like this sort of numbers are really important. Why? Is it all about popularity? How fast people join a “club”? I think this point is unclear. I mean it’s certainly impressive to have 16K fans, but this is not crucial, is it? Have I missed something?
Don’t get me wrong, I love to read your blog, but this point just bugs me.
I’m going to try using prezi for a workshop tomorrow with my 5th grade teachers. We’ll see how it goes! Thanks for letting me know about it!