Social Media Journal: November 6, 2010
I have been working on Voice Thread and Prezi all day, and it is a beautiful Saturday!!
I will include my thoughts on Voice Thread, which will be in my groups final presentation in December in some form, but I thought some might want this info beforehand. These is more in an earlier Blogs as well as I have investigated it many times now to let it sink in and think about how it might be useful in research.
More on VoiceThread http://voicethread.com
VoiceThread is an incredible tool that offers a place for communicating, collaborating, and conversing on line, Web 2.0, that can be especially valuable to educators. By offering audio and video along with text, photos, or document presentations like PowerPoint, the interactive discussion can be much more lively and interesting than straight documents. Products for teachers, K-12 and Higher Education, are available and teachers can upload their materials and open a discussion that has the feel of students being present in the classroom due to audio components and additionally because photographs, avitars, or symbolic representations of participants can be seem around a central screen. It is a way of increasing the social presence and interaction engendering the feeling of being known and part of the group. Students can observe images, documents, stories, poems, or lessons visually, auditorially, or through text and participate with their own media or annotations on the central screen. Universities are using VoiceThread for lectures and on-line courses as location and time zone are not an issue as participants can check in and out at their convenience or on the professor’s schedule. I can’t help but think that this could have been useful in our own program as one of the advantages reported its that it helps create a sense of belonging to a community when students are in different cities and countries and collaboration is wanted but often a challenge. Learning can be fostered by this proactive means of responding that gives everyone a chance to speak and be heard and receive comments from the professor as well as others in the group. To engender connection group pictures or personally chosen symbols appear when one make a comment and both are embedded around the central space of the image or text. Participants can make their comments and be heard in their own voices. Choices for responding are several: through their spoken voice on a mic or through the telephone, by texting, by adding their own videos, or adding an audio file. This tool allows comments to be gathered in one space and shared by all selected to participate. This can be a secured site or in other instances and at the creator’s discretion the discussion can be opened to the public.
Other products are available for businesses and professionals for a fee, which allow much more space for creating imaginative presentations and discussions. The term “asynchronous” was used on the site as meaning that participants can work on the site at any time. Free versions require registration and signing in and then you can experiment in a limited way with browsing others products and creating simple ones of your own using your voice. The usefulness of this for our purposes in tour Lesley program would be in an additional way of making a discussion more alive as multimedia could be employed. Actually hearing each other’s voices could add a great deal to feeling tone and interest of members participating. Elluminate has many problems particularly with following with many distractions and having back and for conversations between participants. Also, there is not enough time ever to have all voices included in the discussion. This could be a way of responding that was much more real and could be in addition to written responses on threads. Both are useful.
As far as my own research, which uses interviews, which are considered confidential, this tool is not appropriate. Possibly if I were doing a blog that was open to women artists who had recovered from major illness and wanted to talk about their experiences and perhaps share images with others, Voice Thread would be a good way to do this as people could choose to participate and even do so under another name. Another possibility would be to start a discussion on various art works and have a collaborative discussion. There is a large group of disabled artists who can not get out to galleries and museums and this could be a way of including them in an on line community.
Further information suggested that similar tools would be: Animoto, Jing, Voki, or Wikispaces.
It was also noted by Google that VoiceThread was one of the top 100 tools and would soon be ADA compliant. I believe they had done this now and have done work for the hearing impaired in Washington, DC.
Prezi.com
The idea of Prezi is a good one. To enliven PowerPoint presentations would be a real plus as they are very boring and text exhausting to sit through. I had hoped for more in my attempts to manipulate the canvas, but found it very unresponsive and difficult, in not impossible to get what I wanted in colors, fonts, and timing. Perhaps it is just slow or tools are not able to perform adequately. I am used to a Mac, which is what all the designers and creatives in NYC and probably elsewhere use, and I would bet that this program was not designed either for or by Mac people. There is much more available that is more user friendly on Apple. I could be wrong, but as an artist, this does not do enough for me and I couldn’t get it to follow the paths and do a slideshow or animate except with me doing something each time. So, here is a simple one that I don’t find all that interesting, so will explore further for final assignments. Any comments would be welcome. All of the images are ones that I have personally taken, except this one of Deep Space, see info below.
http://prezi.com/ehzwmp3evn5j/edit/#28_4012770
This is an image in the Prezi that I took of a photo exhibited at The Rubin Museum of Art here in New York. See info..
No comments:
Post a Comment