Prezi and my poor PC

Prezi is this very impressive "zooming presentation editor," as they put it.  You enter text, images, or web links, size them how you like, group them together, and create a viewing path to tell your story.  Your objects are clickable to zoom, whether you're presenting to a group or just leaving your show on the web.  Here's the intro:



I used it for a project, and found it pretty intuitive (once I figured out the magic of hidden frames to control groupings and focus on portions of images). Only problem - my poor old PC's 512 MB of memory couldn't handle it, stomped its little foot, and froze me out. Emergency move to husband's laptop ensued.

P.S. Look, I embedded a video!

Jing!

Capturing a snapshot of a website, and putting it up on another website, seemed like something really fancy.  But then we used Jing in one of my classes, and it was simple!  We're even taping Jing screencasts to critique each other's work, which is a little nervewracking in other ways, but still simple. This is the kind of technology that would have been hard for me to find on my own, because I wouldn't even have known to call it a "screen capture."

I don't "get" Facebook

So, for my course in social media, I've created a Facebook account to try and understand what it's all about. Uploaded a picture, tried to make sure there's nothing personal on there, figured out how to get my name in the web address (a text message - really? Do people actually find Facebook user-friendly?), friended my husband, who I'm pretty sure was my friend anyway, and now...what?  It seems I'm supposed to 1) troll around for friends 2) post something 3) link to something 4) like something.  I'm not getting what the basic activity is here.  I guess social networks make more sense to people who are actually sociable.  Oops.

It's a start...

Somewhere, after e-mail but before smartphones and Twitter, I lost my technological way.  It wasn't a big deal at first - so what if I didn't have a blog - but now, like Rip van Winkle, I'm waking up to find that everything has changed. Some tipping point has been passed. People (other people) no longer "go online," but live online, and carry it with them everywhere.


I'm not sure how far I'll go to join them, but unlike my 86-year-old father, who is happily ignoring the computer age, I do need to understand what they're all experiencing.  I'm not a technophobe; heck, I used to explain Gophers at library Internet trainings, and still remember the awe I felt at an early demonstration of Netscape. I'm glad to have those memories, but it's time to move on.


In three weeks of classes at the SUNY IDT (Information Design and Technology) master's bootcamp program, I've learnt more than I thought possible.  This blog is here to chronicle that journey, both in school and the rest of my life, and maybe to practice some new tricks.  As I scolded my elderly PC (512 MB of memory, thankyouverymuch) as it struggled with the Prezi website for an IDT project, "If I can do it, so can you!"  Well, it couldn't do it, and I moved to my husband's laptop instead. But I won't take that as an omen, and hope this journey will be a cheerful one.