http://prezi.com

The basics

Prezi is a different approach to visual presentations that could be a very useful tool for inspiring and expanding upon digital creativity. Unlike Powerpoint, with its linear, dot-point emphasis, Prezi is about movement, structure and display. Prezi claims that “Presentations have not evolved much in the 50 years since the slide was invented, but Prezi is changing that. Prezi lets you bring your ideas into one space and see how they relate, helping you and your audience connect. Zoom out to see the big picture and zoom in to see details — a bit like web-based maps that have changed how we navigate through map books.”

Making a prezi involves the usual tasks of creating a slide-based presentation – trimming content to fit, thinking about the structure of the overall presentation and the way one slide relates to another, either directly (in a sequene) or through conceptual links. Prezi is best understood by looking at a good example:

What is intriguing

Prezi moves presentations beyond text and linearity providing the first relatively easy-to-use tool for people to create something from scratch which feels more like a multimedia animation. What is intriguing is the degree to which the forms and processes of creating a ‘knowledge object’ influence the cognition associated with it. It is well known that writing is thinking (that one writes so as to clarify ideas and understand better, not just to express some pre-formed idea). By analogy, creating a presentation is also thinking — if we change the way we do these ‘creation’ tasks, utilising clever digital creativity tools, then we may be able to either improve the thinking process, change it so that it better accommodates different kinds of learning and thinking, or simply provide learners with alternatives to knowledge formation that better suit them.

Prezi also has an aesthetically interesting interface, the sense of space and freedom of movement is clear – especially in comparison to Powerpoint. The openness can be confusing or debilitating until you get used to it: however, in the longer run, there’s great possibilities to encourage students to think laterally, to be more fluid in their thought processes. Prezi feels, at times, like a mind-mapping tool oriented towards publication: it brings closer together the ‘idea work’ and the ‘final presentation’, all in one space.

A view of the creation screen, while making a prezi

Pedagogic Challenge

The challenge with Prezi is to step away from the natural link between a ‘designerly’ kind of software application (which would naturally suit visually creative design, art, screen media students) and its use with just those kinds of students. One reason to use Prezi would be to challenge students studying in other disciplines, perhaps ones that have a more textual tradition but which could usefully benefit from an integrated text-visualisation approach, to take something which they have learned, and express it back in a different form. So, the task would be for students to learn by the act of re-expression: as we know, learning is most often best accomplished by the active work of students in response to knowledge but, with prezi, we can change the format and structure in which that knowledge is expressed and thereby test the degree to which it has been properly understood. The challenge would remain, however, in terms of marking: if the assessor did not have flexibility of mind and visual ‘take’ on expressions of knowledge then good student work might still be assessed as poor. The challenges are not just how students can use something like Prezi — but also how teachers will respond.

Why this tool is not ‘top 10′

Prezi is not quite as free as some tools: there are educational versions, but students may find that they need to spend a small amount of money to get full access to Prezi. For this reason alone, Prezi cannot make a ‘top 10′ list. Perhaps more significantly, Prezi suffers (like Cohere) from the need for students to learn how to use it, to get the most out of it. Prezi could, for some students, be very intuitive and simple; for others it might be baffling and disempowering. While at times we want to challenge students to learn new approaches and to persevere through difficulties, this may not be as productive if the students are thereby distracted from achieving more vital learning outcomes. Prezi has its uses, for sure, but it is more intriguing at this stage than definitive.

Alternatives

None: that’s the point. Prezi is the alternative to Powerpoint.