
Prezi - The Zooming Presentation Editor - gulbrandr
http://prezi.com/index/
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SimonPStevens
Prezi is certainly a cool innovation in presentation style, but you have to be
even more careful than you do with Powerpoint that you don't let your
presentation be dominated by the tool over the content.

I've seen Prezi used subtly to great effect, but I've also seen it abused
where complex transformations are used for what really should have just been
plain text.

Where it works is where you have a true overall structure (such as a map or
blueprint or the object you are talking about) that actually represents your
presentation, and isn't just some abstract pattern you've decided to shape
your text around. For example a presentation on a new model of car where the
overall structure is the drawing of the car and the Prezi moves around and
zooms in as you discuss individual parts.

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gingercat
Our presenters used it at last month's DrupalCon in Chicago.

On the plus side, you can build very quickly once you get the hang of it and
not get sidetracked with a lot of formatting options. It's also nice to be
able to flip to a non-linear mode where you can just click to whatever it is
you want to talk about and not flip back through your slides. The zooming
provides for very simple hiding and emphasis of points, including "hiding"
extra content for future sharing (eg, embedding).

The big downside is you have to be _really_ careful with the panning and
zooming. What seems like 'just a little' when your building can easily feel
like an amusement park ride when it's on a big screen. Also, you can't upload
to slideshare unless you record it as a video first.

Overall, we were very happy with it, and the audience seemed to enjoy it. But
you definitely want to build some practice Prezi's before doing the real
thing. We found it very useful, but it has the potential to be very
distracting if you aren't careful.

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_delirium
For some reason, Prezi has been _really_ widespread at humanities venues since
2009 or so, especially any sort of computer/media/digital-oriented areas of
the humanities. But, I've never seen it used at a CS conference.

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nchlswu
Perhaps this is a shortsighted and gross overgeneralization, but I would
imagine CS conference attendees are more interested in the content of a
presentation than the humanities. Presentation style and stylistic elements
that can make or break some presentations are more important in a digital
media oriented field than more academic or technical fields.

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danieldk
Yes, but I think the parent wants to point out that it is popular in
humanities as in academics (who are also interested in content).

To me the difference seems to be that CS people are more aware of current
technical possibilities, and take a "we've been there before" attitude. To
humanities people, it's all new and spectacular. And who doesn't want to
impress their peers?

As someone who works on the border between both fields, I can only hope this
soon blows over. It tends to be overused and annoying, though I can see it as
beneficial in non-academic fields.

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_delirium
That's probably true, although parts of CS have an almost active aversion to
new technology, especially on the UI side, which might be part of it. Sort of
the stereotypical bearded Unix guru who doesn't want any of your damn
newfangled touchscreens or GUI widgets near his computer science.

(I don't even really mean that negatively; my own computing style tends
towards CLI, and/or "weird" window managers like dwm.)

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nchlswu
Among people I've seen use it, there's this tendency to dive in head first to
use it. I get the impression that the general thinking is to differentiate
themselves from the crowd (and since I'm in school, the thought is they'll get
better marks). In reality, a bad presentation is a bad presentation, no matter
how you package it (lipstick on a pig anyone?). Once Prezi becomes a norm like
PowerPoint (I think it will), I'm curious how Prezi will position itself

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rjrodger
Great tool - highly recommended.

One tip: go very easy on the movement - you'll make your audience sea sick!

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bvttf
good use of prezi, the presentation on the chip & pin break from last year.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv3dxjvqk7Y>

