Friday, 5 August 2011
Share and share alike
'Just a test' is probably the most boring presentation...ever. As the name suggests it is just a test so don't worry 23thingsadmin/information literacy guru, I've not gone completely mad. I just wanted to create a SlideShare account, which required me to make a quick PowerPoint to upload as a test so that I knew what the website was like (I used a few of the images from my previous Prezi - see below).
At first glance I hadn't realised what slideshare was. I thought it was an online PowerPoint-a-like, like a more static Prezi. On closer inspection I discover that it is actually a presentation sharing website, a simple but excellent idea. Once you upload a presentation to the site, you control whether you share publicly or privately and you choose whether to allow others to download your presentation or not. Others can comment, follow your presentation uploads using RSS and you have a single profile holding your archived presentations, each one tagged for ease of searching. To view presentations you don't even need to register, and if you do register and upload it's incredibly intuitive. This is a simple innovation for Microsoft's well loved PowerPoint programme: it creates the potential to share presentations, a potential only possible in this way through social media.
What is the application of SlideShare? In an academic setting (ie a university class) this tool would probably be surplus to requirements, because presentations can already be uploaded and shared through the institutional VLE, but in other settings this is a really useful concept. Conference presentations can be shared on SlideShare, without hundreds of paper handouts being printed. University students can use it for group work without having to be physically together: when working on a presentation they can share, download, edit and re-upload it remotely.
Slideshare supplements Prezi perfectly. Prezi is both a zooming presentation creator, and a zooming presentation sharer because all prezi's are on the site and (with public settings) are viewable to anyone. SlideShare allows all other presentations to be viewable to anyone (PowerPoints, Google Docs and even PDF's). Together, they allow any currently conceivable presentation to be sharable, downloadable, able to be viewed multiple times and therefore make presentations much more flexible (and I'd say useful) than presentations have ever been before.
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zzzzzzzzzz...oh sorry your Justatest slideshare made me drop off;-) Like your thoughts on where slideshare has value and how it isn't just a static 'here's my powerpoint' window. The sharing works really well and can be a really useful way to promote your services.
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