VisMe Experiment

Over the last two weeks, I have been on campus visits. The campus visit is the last stage of the interview process for those of us staying in academia once we get our terminal degree. One of the steps in the campus visit interview (one of my interviews lasted for 21 hours over 2 days to give you a sense of scope), was to give a scholarly presentation on my own work.

One of my main aims was to use a presentation software that would look clean, and be something that most of the faculty I knew would be present for my presentation had not yet seen a lot. After some research and one trial with a timeline software, I chose VisMe.

Below is a mostly final draft of my presentation. If it works properly, you can push play, or click through it to view it.

The process of using VisMe was interesting, particularly since I didn’t *notice* that it is still in beta when I began. In fact, despite the very clearly noted ‘beta’ attached to the logo, I still missed it, all the way until I was frustrated with the build process.

VisMe-beta-marked

What I DO like about VisMe is the clean minimalist design that is really in at the moment. Each template has a library of pages the user can choose from in order to built a well rounded presentation. The designs are built already to give the user a sense of how a presentation could look, depending on what the presentation material is covering.

And even though the pages are built for you – here is an example:

VisMe-sample-page

You are not required to keep the page this way. As you can see, I altered the template page a lot to fit my needs.

Visme-sample-page-2

As a user, I am able to completely revamp any aspect of any slide that I choose. But I found the template to be a really great guide as a first time user. The end product turned out beautiful, and I was complimented on how clean it looked.

Because VisMe is in beta, it still has a lot of bugs. Among these bugs are the incredible difficulty involved in clicking on text I have created in a text box. Once I created text, and aligned it with other objects, if I found a typo, or wanted to edit, I had to drag the text box away, and then click vigorously and hope that I might somehow land my cursor in the magical spot that would then select the text I wanted to edit. If my apartment neighbors didn’t think I was crazy already, they surely do now. Frustration.

And then of course there are the mystery issues that come with all software. For example, I published my test presentation to see what options would appear once I published. The library of slides disappeared. I had to completely start my presentation over. Of course it turned out better, as many of you have probably experienced for yourselves. But… this problem has only happened one time. I published the above presentation, and none of the same problems persist. Face to palm – I’m feeling a little gaslighted.

The last problem I want to address is that once an animation is applied to text, it cannot be fully deleted. It CAN be altered, but not completely deleted and this led to more frustration and yelling on my part. Because of this issue, I ended up downloading each slide (a publishing feature) and putting the whole thing inside a power point presentation – animation problem solved.

Probably the most interesting part of VisMe is that it exists in the cloud. Since I only played with the free version, I had no access to the cloud editing and sharing capability, but it exists. Of course, my presentation exists in the cloud, and is clearly hosted above that way, which is a viable and relevant part of cloud computing. But in order to access sharing features, I need to pay the monthly business fee, which is not feasible for a scholar who might use this once or twice a year. But knowing it exists is relevant to many of the arguments I am currently making about the work of composing in the cloud – so I may dip back in here for further exploration.

Until then – give it a try if you are in the mood to learn something new that is improving as the company grows.

 

 

Designing for Tools

This morning the Tools Wiki team had a meeting with Brennan Collins to discuss our design research for the project. I must say, we came up with some pretty great stuff. Mostly, I’m impressed with the amazing ideas my team has – Go Team!

Ultimately, we decided to use edublogs because of the features the different themes afford us. We each chose a different theme and 3 tools to feature and we set to work playing with the sites. Below are links to the 3 pages we built – all experimenting with things that edublogs can do:

Roxanne: http://sites.gsu.edu/rgreesontools/

Wasfi: http://sites.gsu.edu/wmomentools/

Me: https://sites.gsu.edu/vrobin1/

As you can see, each has a distinct look and feel and even the menus act differently, which is our biggest struggle. We have decided to go with Roxanne’s theme, which is called ‘fifteen’ and she is going to play with the menu functionality to see what she can get the theme to do.

Please check back for updates on the tools wiki progress.

Wiki Mayhem

This week was the start of school. But that’s not as important as the fact that it’s also Dragon Con week. What this means is that I will need to be front-loading all my work into the first few days of the week, save some meetings coming Thursday because my friend, author, and fellow blogger, Giando Sigurani will be coming in to join in the festivities with me.

What does that mean for my SIF work? It means that I’ve been researching far and wide the different styles and platforms for wiki’s out there.

In case you haven’t read this helpful over-view article, here is an handy “How to Start Your Own Wiki” article with some great starter links in it. I’ve explored several wikis with some pretty attractive design elements (never minding the content): Wet Paint is a celebrity gossip page, and  my favorite video game, Don’t Starve, even has its own wiki page for users to try and figure out how to build and create things the characters need in the game.

The great thing about wikis is that they don’t have to all look like wikipedia. They can be designed to look like a regular web page, but they still are made up largely user content. The idea behind all this research is to create an attractive and intuitive wiki where students can post pages about tools they can use in class, on projects, or just to make life easier.

I will be posting relatively regularly about the tools wiki as it develops, so please check back often for news, successes and failures on this project.