EDUCAUSE

I've just returned from the Educause 2009 conference in Denver, Colorado.  I'll blog about some of the sessions I attended elsewhere, but I wanted to highlight in this post a couple of things which Educause (the organisation, not the conference) is doing on the topic of "communications".

The Educause Review magazine often has interesting and useful articles, and in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue there's an excellent article entitled "Good Communication: The Other Social Network for Successful IT Organizations" by Lisa Trubitt and Jeff Overholtzer.  I think this paper captures rather well both the relationship management and the information dissemination aspects of IT services' communications agenda, and certainly is well worth reading - particularly if you need to persuade your IT department's senior management of the value and importance of these activities!

Educause have an ITCOMM  Constituent Group, rather like UCISA's own Communications Group.  They have a mailing list, a wiki, and a number of resources (mainly presentation slides) built up over the last couple of conferences.  They did have a group meeting in Denver, which I (alas) did not hear about until too late.  The meeting notes point to some interesting and relevant material.

Of course, the US environment is different from the UK environment.  One of the main differences is the size of the UK community (very much smaller than the US) and another is the scale of institutional resources available (US institutions are in general much richer thanks to the generosity of their alumni).  Nevertheless, there are significant similarities, and we can both learn from and contribute to the US community.

We do of course have our own wiki and mailing list - please use  tham!

Presentations with Prezi

A few weeks ago I started tinkering with a piece of software called Prezi which is available free (you can also upgrade at a cost), and is a tool to create presentations.

I was looking to create a way of pulling all the presentations together for the CiCS Departmental meeting.

I did find it frustrating at times, but after a few hours I had actually produced something I was reasonably happy with which can be seen here. The compromise was that it didn't encompass the presentations people were making except for a hyperlink - however time didn't allow me to look at moving other peoples presentations into Prezi.

In the end I chose not to use this at the departmental meeting as there was a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong, however its an interesting way of producing presentations once you get your head round it.

A number of other people within the University have started to use Prezi, another example of a presentation using it can be seen here.

Over time we will look and see if we will use Prezi, it does however provide an interesting alternative to PowerPoint (for now).