In recent years, the development of the Web 2.0 principle has led to an explosion of software available online to do just about anything you could possibly want it to. Simple websites providing simple functions hosted entirely in the cloud, normally completely free – what’s not to like?
Having the functions available is all very well, but knowing what to use for any specific task is a skill which makes the difference between a very poor result and an exceptional one. Recently, I have been looking into ways of presenting information (not data*) which has been processed from the results of our VLE surveys, and finding a range of tools on the web to do it.
What is to like?
A basic web search for creating presentation tools brings up eight online services in the top 10 search results, and all of them have at least a basic version available free. We all like free stuff, and we like finding it quickly – getting started on a presentation online takes less than a minute.
With a huge range of tools out there, there must also be something which does everything you want it to, and which can create a presentation exactly how you want it to look – whether you want to export it into HTML, download an image, or combine the two and make an infographic in Canva to use as the background for a Prezi. Whoa – fancy!
These tools are great to use, too. The market is so competitive that they have to be comfortable to use – familiar from the outset, fast, and designed with the user in mind. There are none of the old standards which come with desktop programs, gradually migrating from one version to another and trying to keep an archaic interface ticking over.
The ease of having this functionality available online, free, 24/7 means that some of the traditional boundaries to collaboration are broken down – compatibility and access. One of the principles behind web 2.0 is ‘Software as a Service’ – the software is provided as a service online, which is accessed whenever it is required. When not required, it goes away, unlike desktop programs and apps which stay behind on your computer. It can be updated whenever the owner wants, because that just means pushing new code to a server somewhere on the Internet – much easier than trying to get several million users to download an update to the program they currently use locally on their computer. Everyone uses the same version of the software, and that means there are no compatibility issues, as you might get with PowerPoint 2007 and 2013.
If someone has access to the World Wide Web (not the Internet*), regardless of where they are in the world, they can use the software. This means collaboration can take place across the world, and it doesn’t need any specialist software installed on machines so internet cafés do the job just as well as personal laptops. Having information stored in the cloud also means that the latest version is always the one being worked on – no more trying to merge changes when you mistakenly open the copy you saved last week.
So what’s not to like?
Each of these tools is excellent at what it does. They all know exactly what they are trying to achieve, and execute it very well. The problem is, this is usually of limited scope. For example, if you want to animate the arrival of text on a page, you’ll find that isn’t covered by Haiku Deck, or Canva, and pretty soon you’re going to be wishing you’d just fired up PowerPoint anyway.
If you’re like me and loathe to give away any sort of passwords or personal information, these sites will not be for you. Each one will require a login and a password, and since you only found them through a search and spent all of half a second scanning the description, giving away an e-mail address and password seems premature. That’s not to say for one minute that these sites aren’t secure – I’m sure they are – but be careful. The more places you give out an e-mail address, the more likely you are to recieve spam.
The biggest gripe…
Despite this, by far my biggest problem with these sites is the effect they have on the presentation you are trying to give. Too often, the train of thought runs, “I need to create a presentation on this year’s sales figures. Prezi’s cool. I’ll use that.” The result: a presentation which takes longer than it should to create, longer than it should to deliver, and doesn’t get across the key information in a logical manner. You should be presenting figures – the information needs to be clear, the presentation style can be entirely forgettable.
Similar things can occur when trying to deliver a lecture, with plenty of information available, using Haiku Deck. Sure, it looks pretty, but one line of text per slide along with a vaguely associated image is not enough to deliver a powerful message. Great for showing off a gallery of photos, rubbish for teaching anything meaningful.
These are just examples, and it is of course very easy to create a bad presentation in PowerPoint, but be aware of the basic point – use the right tool for the job. Decide what you want the presentation to look like, and then use the luxury of Web 2.0 and the huge range of available software to create it, rather than letting the tool dictate the way the presentation flows, and the content you put in it.
What will we use?
During the course of my research, I have come across a range of sites which provide a useful functionality for presenting our information. Once the survey data comes in, it will be analysed and processed to turn it in to information we can present and draw conclusions from.
While the overall review will have to be summarised in a word processed report, for distribution and maintenance of records, we will also be trying to come up with innovative ways to get our conclusions across to the academics and students who will make most use of it. This means we are looking into good ways to present information clearly, and most importantly visually.
As a result, infographics have come up a lot as a good way of getting the information across. There are a number of online sites which can be used for creating the graphic. The first result that appears in a search is VisMe, but a limited number of stock templates, limited adjustability, and fairly poor user interface, mean it is difficult to get the desired result.
Instead, Canva has far more customisation tools and adjustability, and the ability to download the resulting graphic as an image file to be imported elsewhere. All of the functionality is free and only premium templates and graphics are charged for – it is easy enough to generate a well designed graphic without spending a penny.
When it comes to a tool to present the infographic, this is where Prezi comes in to its own. Being able to zoom in on a particular statistic, talk about it, then zoom out again and show the whole poster to see how things all fit together, is a fantastic way to show off a large amount of connected research and statistics. I would look no further.
We can also distribute the information and conclusions through the World Wide Web. This was initially designed specifically for the purpose of linking together a collection of multimedia files – exactly what we intend to do. Building a website through HTML is therefore a very feasible way of connecting all of our work together. Best of all, it can be accessed on a range of mobile devices, increasing its catchment.
But hold on – before going diving into a text editor and writing the html from scratch, there are yet more sites which will let you create a presentation-style set of pages, and export into fancy HTML5 format. These range from very professional systems to hobbyists writing code for Github in their spare time. One of the most talked about is impress.js, which is essentially a javascript library which renders html pages in an infinite canvas. It requires reasonably advanced html knowledge to get the most out of, but more than pays that back.
Presentation of information in an attractive format does not come as naturally to html as it does to other tools. However, the beauty of open source is that if something can be made better, somebody will write a library that does it. Step forward Google, who have created a library for creating interactive graphs of every type under the sun. An example of what is possible is shown in image format on the left; it can be found in interactive form at this demo page.
In Conclusion…
There are a lot of ways to present information. Collecting it is only part of the puzzle; there is far more that needs to be done to get the point across in a succinct and memorable manner. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools available to do the job… but they have to be used correctly in order to be effective.
We will be using a combination of tools selected because we have chosen how we want to present things, and what we want to look like, and then chosen the tool which completes that task in the simplest way possible. When the presentation is done – keep an eye out for updates.
Footnote
*Data and information: data is raw, unprocessed numbers. Presenting someone with data, e.g. 26.33, will mean absolutely nothing to them. Data is processed and given context to convert it into information, which is meaningful and understandable. In our case, data would be the numbers of respondents in each category – information is the percentage these numbers represent, linked to the categories, so that a trend in the answer can be established.
The Internet refers to hardware. It is the cables, servers and routers which provide connections between all computers connected to it. The World Wide Web is purely data – it is binary data which is transferred over the internet and rendered on web browsers to produce information which can be viewed. The data is in the form of multimedia files which are linked together using hyperlinks, generating a software network on top of the Internet, which is a hardware network. This distinction means very little in common language but is important when considering the availability of software and data.
Alex McCormick 