prezi for academic presentations?
I have played around a bit with Prezi, the whizbang presentation software that Tedsters, Hans Rosling (actually, here’s GapMinder) and other cool people use.
Some quick takes on Prezi.
The positives:
- visual focus
- nice macro layouts and views
- cloud-desktop interface very handy
- sure to impress some audiences
- quite easy to use
- big bonus: the company is very nice to educators – you can download a free desktop version (with 500MB of memory)
- relatively easy to “Prezify” old keynote or powerpoint slides – I converted some old slides and it was seamless (though, you have to go from pdf to Prezi – which creates within-slide limitations)
- some cool collaboration options (haven’t tried them though)
- handles images beautifully
Negatives:
- gimmicky
- very gimmicky
- remember that first 1995 presentation you saw with slide transitions, you know, where the presenter proudly smirked with each transition – Prezi feels like that (I saw someone present with Prezi and the emphasis clearly was on the fact that the presenter was using Prezi, not the content)
- shoot me if someone pulls up with their iPad2 and plugs in a Prezi – though the cloud might obviate that
I’ll probably be using Prezi in some settings (BTW: you can explore Prezi presentations here). It has some nice features.
Though, in terms of teaching, I’ve tried to move away from more than one slide per each class (I’m a chalkboard kinda guy these days), so perhaps not for class. I have a gazillion slides for any given class but I prefer to talk through the issues. For academic presentations, I think simplicity is good. Whizbang just distracts (though, the whizbang factor can also be dialed down in Prezi as well). I’ll probably stick with good ol’ keynote, google and/or ppt – until further notice.
I’m still wondering – what makes for a good academic presentation? For now, it seems that the research question, idea itself and you have to shine. If the technology distracts, then that is a problem.
orgtheory.net 
Lots of similar feelings. I tried it out for a guest lecture once, and of course there was the gimmick factor. There was also a hiccup with the use of a second screen and Apple’s Expose.
I think the main use for this is when you have the equivalent of what would be a grand diagram spread across several chalkboards. With the zooming and spatial features in Prezi, you can really show a nonlinear schematic in a striking way. If you’re telling a more linear story, Keynote or chalk board still win, I think.
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Graham Webster (@gwbstr)
November 14, 2011 at 2:55 pm
I use it for 15-20 minute conference presos. It seems to work well for those … showing the overview and really adding oomph to punch lines is helpful in those settings. The overview feature is also useful in the classroom … I used it for one lecture in an MBA classroom (and, face it, MBAs like gimmicks). For a full academic seminar presentation, I think you’d have to be fairly careful.
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@mdryall
November 14, 2011 at 4:43 pm
The Coca-Cola example on the Prezi website made me motion sick, but I am unusually sensitive in that regard. I think it could be useful for (gulp!) detailed box-and-arrow diagrams. Zooming in and out and still being able to see the whole structure could be handy.
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stevepostrel
November 15, 2011 at 12:16 am
I’ve used Prezi for academic presentations and have pretty mixed benefit.
The biggest benefit is that you can draw our your presentations like a poster and essentially think about organizing your poster in two dimensional space and then exploring it that way. I think that’s your macro-level focus point.
I really believe that the best Prezi-style presentations will have the concepts being explored blocked into distinct areas which are visible at farther-out zoom levels and which give you space to explore and unpack details as you both literally and figuratively zoom down onto them. A big problem with the linear presentation is that you often lose track of where you are or what the big picture is. Prezi and similar can give you that.
That said, most people don’t use Prezi that way. Many people just sort of throw their information onto the canvas and use Prezi as a source of fancy transitions. I don’t think anybody really benefits from that – especially in an academic context. Prezi’s tools for layout are primitive as well. Compared to what you could get in Inkscape, Illustrator, or even OpenOffice Impress or Powerpoint, it’s a drag.
I’ve been much happier with Sozi which gives users the same high-level view and zooming functionality of Prezi. That said, it’s built as an extension to Inkscape which means you have a full-fledged vector drawing systems. It provides a much better option for the poster-as-presentation model in the sense that it makes more possible to make awesome posters. Certainly, using it is more complicated, but I think it’s a nice trade-off.
Oh, and it doesn’t mean you are putting all your presentation into some proprietary hosted web service that, when the companies dies or goes away, you no longer have access to. Because that seems like a pretty serious drawback as well.
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Benjamin Mako Hill
November 15, 2011 at 5:11 pm
I have used Prezi dozens of times. I have used it rarely in the classroom, as I have returned to blackboard technology to engage students in discourse. I have used it in exec ed sessions, as they are not as passive as on-campus students and I can hop around more easily in Prezi than in tiresome, linear formats like PPT and Keynote. (BTW, your clever transitions aren’t)
Advantage: You can easily say NO when some lazy individual (student/conference participant/workshop organizer) asks for you slides. There are none. Though, you can be truthful and share the file as web-based presentation…
Advantage: As a nonlinear thinker, I find this a clever way to pile all the materials onto the desktop, then design/test the pathway to see how it flows.
Advantage: It is a very useful tool when presenting to deans and deanlets. They like gimmicks even more than MBAs and I can control the discourse more easily when they are concentrating on the tool.
I like it for presenting SEM diagrams and system dynamics models, which benefit greatly from zoom functions. I also like it for case study presentations, making use of combinations/sequences of images, data, schema, and punch lines.
It may never replace oral history around a campfire in a cave, but I hope it replaces Powerpoint.
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Randy
November 15, 2011 at 7:34 pm
you can also simply use pptflex which is freely available for powerpoint by the microsoft labs. it is less distracting and also allows for the focussing and zooming.
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Rene
November 16, 2011 at 9:17 pm
I get a lot of mileage just out of pinch-zooming with my mac. On my 2008 mac you just hold control and two-finger swipe to zoom. (I believe it’s a slightly different gesture on newer macs). This is invaluable for teaching stats since it lets you zoom in close on the command line then back out to show graphs, etc.
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gabrielrossman
November 16, 2011 at 9:58 pm
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