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Showing, Not Telling: Prezi & Omeka

June 29, 2011, 8:00 am

By Prof. Hacker

Archives[This is a guest post by Caro Pinto, the John Hay Whitney Family Papers Processing Archivist at Yale University Library. Follow her on Twitter at @caropinto.--@jbj]
An Archivist Walks into a Classroom…

Many archivists spend their professional lives working in basements preparing diaries, letters, and photographs for use by students and faculty. Indeed, arrangement and description of such materials represents the bulk of my work as an archivist, but I also spend time in classrooms  teaching students how to discover and evaluate all kinds of information. Archivists do not usually find themselves in the classroom, but I am lucky enough to be an archivist who works directly with students and faculty. 

And why not? Archivists have at their disposal great props for teaching , making it easy to demonstrate and not just talk about materials from collections of manuscripts, records, and papers. In teaching more “traditional” bibliographic instruction sessions for first year students and for history majors, I teach hands-on by showing students how to engage with the research process. This avoids rambling narration and allows me to leverage some amazing twenty-first century information literacy  tools in my sessions, including primary sources,  Prezi and Omeka.

Since finishing graduate school with a degree in library science and and a powerful aversion to PowerPoint, I’ve hunted for an alternative demonstration tool and found it with Prezi. One of my chief complaints about PowerPoint is students’ limited opportunity to engage with the material they see in a slide. Prezi allows users to create live relationships between blocks of text or thought bubbles, dynamically – and daresay entertainingly – linking both pieces of information and the concepts that connect them. A recent classroom experience solidified my love for Prezi.

In the past, to familiarize students with the range of sources they could deploy when writing research papers, I have challenged them to pair a type of resource (scholarly, popular media, trade publication) with a paragraph of text taken from each representative resource. Leveraging Prezi’s ability to move between blocks of text and thought bubbles allowed students to move between all the types of sources and the paragraphs they had to read. The difference this made in this research education session was dramatic. Prezi is visually stunning, and it engaged the students and focused their attention. Since the exercise was a collective effort, they felt more empowered to engage and ask questions. By dynamically going back and forth between the passages and the types of resources together as a group, we were able to generate strong class discussion and make more granular comparisons between the types of resources available to students.

Teaching students about primary sources is a hallmark of history instruction. In my case, when teaching history students about how to locate primary resources at Yale, my go-to database is our Yale Finding Aid Database. The first time I demonstrate the database, students are sometimes uninterested because they are not always familiar with finding aids or primary source research. It’s often too easy to just explain what a finding aid is and talk about how researchers use them, and then demonstrate to students how to input search terms to find one. In recounting this process to you here I am already bored, so I can only imagine how students feel!

To combat the drudgery of this “telling,” I tend to provide an overview of the database once and then conduct an exercise where students have to use primary sources without any context of what they are, when they are from, or on what subject they might be most useful.. I ask them to come up with a paper topic based on primary sources I have handed out to them in folders, and then to reflect on something that was rewarding about working with primary sources and something that was challenging or frustrating. Students encounter several road blocks during this exercise: reading actual handwriting, encountering names of people they are unfamiliar with, and not knowing the context of events depicted in certain materials. When we reconvene, the students vent their frustrations to me about how they did not know anything about the people or events described in the material.

In spite of these hurdles, students enjoy working with the material and wax enthusiastic about how much fun it is to see first hand accounts of the civil rights movement or photographs from the 1901 World’s Fair. Holding onto their attention, I use their frustrations to frame the database search process once more, and students enjoy a “click” moment in which they can connect primary source materials with other secondary sources: as one student said in a recent research education session, “aha! This finding aid will tell me more about this guy receiving letters from racists!” In the end, students experience firsthand the interconnectedness of primary and secondary sources, that one type of source cannot exist without the other and that being able to discover and use both effectively are key skills. Or, as one of my students noted, “it’s totally awesome how this book about the civil rights helps me make better sense of this letter protesting separate but equal!”

Simply projecting a database onto a screen and then praising its capacity to discover and locate primary sources isn’t enough to engage students. Before teaching a recent session in conjunction with a course on photography and memory, I knew that I needed to demonstrate the finding aid database, but I wanted more than that in order to avoid glazed-over student eyes. I decided to build an Omeka site, which allowed me to showcase some of the digital  materials from our collection relevant to student research topics AND link out to our finding aids and the finding aid database. I demonstrated for students how images are connected to the finding aids indexed in our finding aid database. By leveraging Omeka to show students our resources and make clear the connection between the image and finding aid that it originates from with a url to refer back to, I lectured less and actively engaged more of the class. And best of all, having a website allowed me to give students a tangible reference tool they could access after the session was over. By providing access points in the images used in Omeka, students could use the subject headings from Omeka to locate secondary sources in our Online Public Access Catalog AND make the connection that primary and secondary sources work together for successful research.

One of goals of higher education is to mold our students into holistic researchers who can effectively discover and evaluate primary and secondary sources and critically apply them in academic and ‘real world’ contexts. My experiences offer encouragement for faculty, librarians, and archivists alike, that collectively we can leverage a range of tools and materials to make our students savvy consumers of information. Above all, my experiences prove that archivists don’t simply belong in basements or just as primary source cheerleaders, but as a bridge between special collections and traditional library resources. An archivist walking into a classroom shouldn’t be a set-up for a joke, but rather a step forward in 21st century research education best practices.

How has–or how might–library instruction become more dynamic on your campus? Let us know in comments!

Photo by Flickr user carmichaellibrary / Creative Commons licensed

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  • http://twitter.com/karategirl88 Theresa Ortega

    Prezi rocks! I also have a great aversion to PowerPoint. Great points from an academic in the business of making presentations.

  • lsura

    In my experience, Prezi, when not designed very carefully (and even then, if used too quickly) can lead to major motion sickness for at least some in the audience. I like the concept of Prezi, but I don’t like that aspect. Any suggestions for better design with Prezi to help avoid that problem?

  • tubbsjohn

    Prezi unfortunately leaves out our visually disabled students and faculty. Yes I agree Prezi has an engaging interface we need to be more careful in selecting tools that provide equal access for physical and cognitive disabilities.

  • youngt23

    Actually the Prezi website tutorial warns against that and offers suggestions in its three web-based sessions, After learning of this in an endorsement class to earn my Gifted Endorsement, I had my middle school learning Prezi yesterday. I hope her Gifted classes begin to make use of this presentation tool to better focus on the big ideas, better preparation for speaking to groups to communicate ideas

  • mbelvadi

    Using Prezi instead of PowerPoint has recently become trendy at library conferences, but as a member of the audience, it seems to me that the presenters are treating it as if it were still PowerPoint but with a “cool” transition animation between slides (twisting around etc.). Everyone keeps talking about how it provides a better way to visualize the relationship of concepts in a talk, but if the audience is never shown the full view for more than a split second between zoomed in pages, we never get the benefit of that. Maybe I’ve just never seen it used correctly but so far I haven’t seen any value to it over PowerPoint.

  • greyskylark

    I’ve had the same problem.  The tutorials do warn against it, as youngt23 points out, but don’t offer significant help with avoiding motion-sickness-prone design.  Like most things, I imagine practice and testing are key to avoiding the issue.

  • greyskylark

    Hi tubbsjohn!  Can you elaborate a bit?  Is it Prezi’s incompatibility with screen readers that you’re referring to?  I’m interested in using Prezi more but I would like to understand the (in)accessibility issues involved and see if workarounds could be created.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Gabe-Gossett/100000400870891 Gabe Gossett

    One of the strengths of Prezi is the artifact created can be used in many more ways by users who have access to a copy.  It allows them to navigate and zoom in and out on documents in the Prezi, which is probably especially useful for archival presentations.

    Laksamee Putnam has a good post at LibraryTechTalk about using Prezi in libraries too: http://libtechtalk.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/presenting-with-prezi/

  • liujuan
  • http://derekbruff.com Derek Bruff

    I’ve made dozens of Prezis at this point, and I’ve found it helpful to avoid zooming in or out too much in one step. Let’s say, just for an example, I’ve got a large photo of an apple tree. I’m centered on an apple and I’d like to zoom out to see the entire tree. Instead of zooming all the way out in one step, I’ll zoom out to the branch to which the apple is attached, then to the entire tree. This means adding an extra stop along your path, but it’s worth it to avoid the motion sickness.

    Also, I very rarely use any rotations in Prezi. That makes me a bit unusual, I think, since many Prezi’s I see use rotations a lot. But usually there’s no particular reason to rotate other than adding some variety to one’s transitions. I try to use rotations only when there’s a logical, conceptual reason to do so, like when I want to emphasize a transition from one line of argument to a very different line of argument.

    These strategies–not moving too quickly, zooming in steps instead of all at once, and avoiding extra rotations–seem to do the trick for preventing motion sickness.

  • http://derekbruff.com Derek Bruff

    I see this a lot, too. It’s unfortunate, because Prezi makes it possible to convey ideas in ways that are impossible (or at least very difficult) to do in PowerPoint. When I use Prezi, I use images (usually Creative Commons photos from Flickr) to convey individual ideas. That way, later in my talk when I zoom out to show the entire canvas, those images are still visible (icon-sized, but visible) as reminders of the ideas discussed earlier.

    I also try to arrange all my Prezi content on the canvas in a way that shows the relationships among the ideas in my talk. This means that when I zoom out to show the entire canvas, not only are the individual ideas still visible (through those icon-sized images) but the relationships among those ideas are made more clear.

    These two approaches leverage the abilities within Prezi to zoom in and out and to place content wherever you like on the canvas. PowerPoint lacks these two abilities, so Prezis that don’t take advantage of them are often not any more effective than PowerPoint slideshows.

  • http://derekbruff.com Derek Bruff

    Oops, I forgot to link to a sample Prezi of mine. Here’s a recent one that illustrates these techniques.

  • MarjoryMunson

    The “unconference” can work well if the facilitators are skilled in listening – which is often NOT the case. It has been my experience that when “questions from the audience” are solicited, the answers given often do not respond to the real question. Sometimes the question was well stated but the presenterchose to expound on something additional they want to say. Sometimes the question was phrased in such a way that it was simply misunderstood, but the questioner usually does not say, “But that is not what I wanted to ask,” and then try to restate the question. In either case, I often rephrase the question and ask it myself. Often the original questioner will come up to me after the meeting and thank me for understanding what they really wanted to know. Listening is the most difficult part of any communication process.

  • richsc

    Sounds a lot like a break out session or “birds of a feather” so common at tech conferences. “ad hoc” also sounds descriptive.

  • mbelvadi

    I’ve never attended an unconference, so I may be misunderstanding what happens, but from this description it sounds like a waste of time for many people. If a bunch of people go to a room with no fixed topic/theme, and they talk about what some of the people in the room want to talk about, then there are probably some people in the room who aren’t interested in that topic and may find themselves socially “trapped” into not leaving until the session time is over, although the topic is not of relevance to them. In theory there might be an intent that the discussion move to the interests of the majority in the room, but in my professional experience in situations with similar parameters (like meetings without agendas) there are usually a small handful of people who speak up forcefully and control the direction of the topic, and most sit back quietly whether they are interested or not. Like a classroom discussion dynamic, it takes more than a merely good facilitator to prevent that from happening; it takes an extraordinary one, and that particular skill set is pretty rare in the library world at least.

  • juris_prudence

    As others have suggested, there’s nothing new or original here.  Ms. Boule is just slapping a new label — “unconference” — on a common practice, and trying to elevate the practice beyond its usefulness, all for the sake of selling a book.

  • http://amandafrench.net Amanda French

    I coordinate a popular unconference, THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, so naturally I’m biased. But I’m really surprised at the resistance expressed so far in the comments. marjory_j_munson is absolutely right that Q & A sessions at regular conferences aren’t real discussions, but that’s not at all what unconference sessions are like. 

    An unconference is to a conference what a seminar is to a lecture, and, despite juris_prudence’s comment, it has been extremely uncommon in academia to get to talk in a non-hierarchical, explorative way with people you don’t actually work with on a day to day basis. Students do it all the time, but once you’re no longer a student, the only people you get to talk with as a grownup professional are your colleagues. When you get librarians and faculty and students and K-12 teachers and people with all kinds of different jobs and experiences in a room talking about a problem they all face, one of the main benefits is just learning, over and over again, that other people have different perspectives, useful perspectives. 

    And, mbveladi, there are usually at least 3 or 4 separate sessions happening at the same time, so, just as at a regular conference, people don’t go to what they’re not interested in. Sure, sometimes you get dominant speakers in a discussion, but much less so than you do in a college classroom, because the issues are real and the participants are experienced, intelligent professionals. 

    You can check out our evaluations at http://j.mp/thatcampresults. After more than 60 THATCamps internationally in the last three years, 57% strongly agreed that THATCamp was useful for them, 38% agreed, and only 5% disagreed or were neutral.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    We’ve published several posts about THATCamps (the unconference referred to by @alfrench:disqus ) at ProfHacker: check out our archives.

  • voltaire75

    Anything is an improvement on most traditional conferences…no learning, tedious, frigid and pointless, let’s be honest.

  • kosboot

    I think what Alexandra Rice means by “subversive” is that, unlike a typical conference where the topics and speakers are all chosen well in advance by an administrative committee, at an unconference the topics and speakers are chosen pretty much on the spot (perhaps with suggestions made in advance, or web signups made in advance).  The subverise aspect is that the “power” to organize is not made at the top (usually months in advance), but by mutual agreement of the attendees.

    An unconference is not a disorganized group of disparate people, but rather a group of passionate individuals who want to pursue a topic of interest (that may not be adequately covered by other conferences).

    I’ve attended a few of unconferences and they can be very refreshing and inspiring, depending on the attendees.  I wish nearly all conferences would have “unconference” portions that would be able to harness the enthusiasm of the attendees and the knowledge they bring.

  • salchaktoka

    In all fairness, conferences of the American Library Association and its daughter associations are less than worthless — they’re dynamic lemming multipliers.

  • marka

    Unfortunately, one of the premises here is demonstrably false:  ” … what is important is driven by the consensus of the group. You use the wisdom of that group to solve the problem … .”

    A fair amount of research suggests that ‘crowd wisdom’ only really works when each contribution is -independent- e.g., large economic markets [NYSE, etc.], secret ballots, anonymous surveys, etc.

    The problem with ‘consensus’ driven processes are evident with the multiple biases that open social gatherings engender – group think, bandwagon effects, etc. – because the contributions are -dependent- on group dynamics.

    While such gatherings -might- be helpful in individual (anecdotal) cases:  there is no guarantee that they actually gather whatever ‘wisdom’ might be present in the group, and plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the concept.

  • http://amandafrench.net Amanda French

    Yep. Though when you say “pre-announced,” the “pre” can be very short. Different unconferences do it differently: we encourage people to propose stuff on a blog in the weeks before the event, and then we finalize the schedule when we get there in the morning, which means that some proposals might get axed or modified or combined with other sessions. But it’s not as though you’d go into a room not knowing what would be discussed there. And, yes, whoever proposed the topic facilitates the conversation. Or work, or whatever.

  • dremilyt

    As a volunteer for Learning Ally, formerly known as Reading for the Blind & Dyslexic, I thought I should mention this service for visually impaired students or students who need assistance with reading. Learning Ally offers HUMAN-read (not computerized) audio recordings of many textbooks (and other books!), including descriptions of graphs, charts, equations, etc., as well as special devices to aid in reading this way. Read more at http://www.learningally.org, or contact your local Disability Resource Center for help.

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