[CPD23] Thing 17: The medium is the message - Prezi and Slideshare

It has rather amused me reading through the CPD23 feeds over the last couple of weeks and seeing the number of posts along the lines of "This is a placeholder post for Thing 17, order must be maintained! *twitch*" I have to say the thought did cross my mind to do the same! Oh librarians :)

Prezi
I've only recently started using Prezi, after we covered this in Cam23 2.0. At the moment I'm still playing with it, and making frivolous presentations such as this one of my Dublin holiday:

Dublin, September 2011 on Prezi

When I start at UCL I'm sure I will have to start giving proper presentations, so I may have the chance to use this tool then. In the meantime I made my second complete Prezi for CPD23, which condenses my instruction post on Twitter into Prezi form:

Twitter: What's it all aboot eh? on Prezi

I really like Prezi as a presentation tool, it's intuitive to use and for an audience it is nice to see something other than Powerpoint slides once in a while. When I do use it I'll make sure not to whirl about madly and make people sick!

As a project for the future, I would like to have a go at making an interactive map of our library using Prezi, something along the lines of this one by Ned Potter.  I’ll probably need to practice a bit more before I attempt that though...

Slideshare
I’ve only used Slideshare as a creator once before, when I wanted to share a presentation the graduate trainees made for the Libraries@Cambridge conference. Surprisingly, our presentation was chosen as one of Slideshare’s ‘Featured Presentations’ (I’m not sure why, it seems quite a niche topic!) and then went on to get over a thousand views in a week, which was a bit of a strange experience! Again, I think this is something that will become increasingly more useful in the future as I start making more presentations.

Apart from that, I have used Slideshare quite often to view other peoples’ presentations. After conferences or other events I will usually have another look at the presentations, which are often hosted on Slideshare.

I think if you were going for a job in design or marketing, a slide-deck CV could be a good way to show your skills off. If I was going for a job which asked for these skills in the job description, I might consider putting together a Powerpoint or even a Prezi CV. It obviously couldn't contain as much detail as a traditional CV (at least, not without filling your slides with text and making a rubbish presentation) so I don't think it could replace the paper one.

I'm glad the last weeks of the programme are going to be spread out a little bit more, as I start at UCL on Monday. However I think the last few Things are going to be some of the most useful and interesting, so bring it on!