Google Wave: Integrating Multiple Flows

AxisPortals Aphorism:  Catch the Wave (if you get my drift).

 

Twitter Whimsy: Twanalyst.com

AxisPortals isn’t a big believer in personality tests, but does have an appreciation for the whimsical and clever, as in the Twitter Profile Analysis tool from twanalyst.com: 

The statistics are informative, and the analysis light but with a positive educational spin, so this tool is very appealing, and increasingly popular.  If you’re an active Twitterer, why not give it a try?

AxisPortals Aphorism:  When useful information is delivered in an engaging fashion, the line between tools and toys blurs delightfully. 

(Note:  For a counter perspective, see Lois Gray’s recent blog entry on his Twanalyst results.)

Your Health Online: Widgetized

Searching for medical information and community support is one part of supporting your health online.  Now, let’s have a look at another aspect of online health:  the health widget.  Fun, convenient, informative, and potentially motivating, health widgets can easily be embedded in web pages or blogs.  Some can also be downloaded to your smart phone or your computer desktop. Health widgets come in many flavors, including those that focus on weight loss, calorie counting, fitness, pregnancy, exercise, meditation, and health news. Here are a few examples:  

 

Calorie Counter

 

Yoga Pose of the Day

 

The CDC's "Flu IQ" quiz widget.

There are health widgets to suit every taste and interest.  Try exploring to find the ones that suit you or your online audience the best.  You might also consider developing a widget of your own.

AxisPortals Aphorism:  Exercise and diet regimens can grow dull, and health tips can seem preachy, but it’s always fun to widgetize.

 

A Study in Online Collaboration: Open Mosaic

Open Mosaic makes for an interesting study in the ways of collaboration. Earlier this evening, AxisPortals visited the site to add a tree.  The tree was all branches and leaves.  It wasn’t fruit bearing, and it had no background.

Less than five minutes later, the tree was dotted with apples,  and surrounded by a jaunty teal sky with its very own square yellow sun.  Grass and a hot pink and red flower in full bloom soon followed.  Who knows what’s next?  Before the evening is over, the tree could be part of an entire forest, or it could be entirely gone.

Watching the mosaic evolve reminds AxisPortals that digital collaboration with far flung colleagues often requires a certain je ne sais quoi.  To participate fully in the process, and to enjoy it–and to allow others the freedom to do the same–one must be enthusiastic and willing to chase a vision, but must never be so unyieldingly focused on a single vision that it  disrupts emergence of the always shifting whole.  Yielding gracefully, after all (as gracefully as the digital branches in the mosaic yield to the pixel wielder of the moment) , plays a crucial role in collaboration.  There’s plenty of room for individuality and originality, here, but there’s little room for the fixed or the permanent.

Collaborative Mosaic

AxisPortals Aphorism: Online collaboration isn’t really about thinking outside of the box.  It’s about sharing the sandbox willingly, with good humor, and with grace. (So, wish AxisPortals’ tree good luck, but don’t mourn its passing when it goes–something new is sure to grow there.)

Oh, the Places You’ll leogeo

Often,  AxisPortals’ web meanderings lead to interesting, educational, and edifying places.  The leogeo site is definitely one of those places.  Some of the many things to love about it:

1. It is an incredibly beautiful site.  Indeed, it’s a whole gallery of lovely and intriguing things.  Need to persuade someone that there is such a thing as digital art?  Lead that person here. 
2. It’s mesmerizing and involving.  It’s quite impossible, for instance, to stop clicking on timebeat.  Yes, it’s a clock, but such a clock!  Plus, we aren’t generally invited to handle the clockworks, as it were, or to listen to their movement quite so fully, so there’s something very satisfying about it.  It’s a bit haunting, that heart beating away our all too fleeting seconds, but the rhythm is meditative and profoundly relaxing as well. 
3. It’s definitely not text driven.  There is some text, of course, but it sure doesn’t limit itself to behaving in traditional ways.  Plus, it never attempts to explain itself.
4. It’s a wonderful example of how deeply the ways of the web have influenced our literacy.  Perhaps as little as ten years ago, quite a lot of folks wouldn’t have been able to make heads or tails of this space, but now almost all of us are comfortable enough with mouse and screen to know when and where to click.  So, we can figure out the navigation, and we can interact with the art installations in the gallery with no textual prompting.    Quite a far cry from the “click here” and “click me” days of hypertext, isn’t it?  
5. It’s a wonderful reminder of one of the little truths of life that AxisPortals holds most dear:  exploration leads to learning.

AxisPortals Aphorism (with thanks to  leogeo):  Most things really are “best viewed with curiosity” 

 

Reclaiming the Power of PowerPoint

PowerPoint abuse has been so widely commited, suffered, and documented by now that it’s amazing that anyone dares to create a single .ppt slide, anymore, but after experimenting with Prezi’s wonderfully fresh take on presentation software, it occurred to AxisPortals to take a moment to champion the power of PowerPoint by reviewing some best practices:

1. Keep the number of slides to the absolute minimum.  AxisPortals has lately seen far too many presentations involving well upwards of 50-60 slides for speaking slots of of only an hour or two.  Not good!  The more slides, the greater the likelihood of a presenter simply reading from them, which is the cardinal sin because it means that the speaker is engaging neither with the audience nor with the material. 
2. If you intend to distribute print copies of the presentation, do so only after it is over, especially if the document is lengthy (which it shouldn’t be if you’re exercising good .ppt self-discipline and keeping the overall number of slides to a minimum).  If people have the whole presentation in hand, there’s little reason to listen.  They can and will flip ahead.  They can and will simply grab the handout and leave.
3. Conversely, if you’re using your slides truly as prompts, illustrations, and attention getting overviews, a handout with a space for notes about the real meat of the presentation–the part not captured on the slides–can be truly useful to the audience. 
4. Approach slides creatively.  Sometimes, an embedded image or video is the best illustration of or backdrop for the point you wish to make or the argument you’re advancing.  Envisioning a slide as a counterpoint to what you will be discussing in a given portion of your presentation can also be very effective.  Resisting the urge to record every single thing you intend to say is the key, here.  Better to make a surprising list that isn’t self explanatory, and then let the presentation itself demonstrate how these are connected.  For instance, you might include a bare bones and intriguingly puzzling list such as “Airplanes, Fences, Boxers, Pom Poms, Stripes, Fossil Fuels,” and let your presentation itself make the connection apparent.  If you make the connection compellingly, then your audience will forever associate these terms with your argument.
5. Keep priorities and directionality properly sorted out when using any slide show tool.  Remember, the slides are there to underscore your presentation in a memorable way.  You aren’t there to present the slides.  The slides are there to illustrate and support a presentation that should always transcend them.
6. One of the most well-received presentations AxisPortals has ever delivered proceeded entirely without the carefully prepared and timed slide show meant to illustrate it.  The act of preparing the slide-show was key because it entailed rehearsing, tightening, clarifying, and polishing the whole.  The slides weren’t missed, and there’s a lesson in that.
7. Always focus on your audience, not your slide-show.  If your slides give you another way to connect to your audience, then you’re doing it right.  You don’t need the slides, but they’ll enhance your effort.  If you’re facing your slides, reading from them, and spending most of your time reading from the projected image, then you’d be far better off ditching the PowerPoint show.
8. PowerPoint is at its most powerful when you control it.  If it controls you, then the power is in the wrong spot.

That’s a good presentation.  In deliberately doing everything wrong, this speaker does everything right, and his point–powerfully made via PowerPoint–isn’t easily forgotten.

AxisPortals Aphorism:  Claim your power as a speaker.  Never let it slide.

Prezi-dential

As a fan of mind mapping tools–and as one of the many who appreciate that presentation tools can be used really well but are predominantly abused–AxisPortals has been having an especially good time experimenting with Prezi.

 Because this new mind mapping and presentation tool is not at all driven by division into slides, anyone who is very familiar with a more typical slide show tool  will probably need to create several experimental Prezi-tations before its distinctive flow starts to feel really natural, but it’s well worth the effort.  Watching the demo videos on the site and interacting with the sample presentations there is also helpful.

Definitely worth the effort.

AxisPortals Aphorism:  Think Outside of the Slide

 

Bamboo-dling!

Today, AxisPortals has spent some time growing familiar with and fond of a new tool/toy. (All of the best tools are also toys, and vice versa–just ask any iPhone owner!)

The Bamboo Tablet  definitely counts as both an absorbing toy and truly useful tool.   Anyone who has ever tried to draw or to retouch photos with a clunky and uncooperative mouse will immediately appreciate how nimble this digital pen and pad are by comparison.  Plus, Bamboo makes it easy to capture handwriting in a variety of programs, so quick and personal handwritten comments, annotations, illustrations, and highlights can be incoporated into all sorts of documents, from slide shows to email posts.

AxisPortals will continue to explore the exciting possibilities.  Meanwhile, here’s a quick taste of the kind of custom illustration that this powerful little tool (which doubles as a  nifty little toy) turns into a breeze to make.

AxisPortals Aphorism:  Children tend to learn with joyful abandon.  Their classrooms tend to be filled with toys.  Coincidence?  AxisPortals thinks not.