StevenLey.com has been out of date for some time. Why? Well, I've been staying wonderfully active elsewhere. I've been working on the International Documentary Challenge, everything KDHX, and spending some time with BounceBackSTL.net's web site. At KDHX we're in the process of migrating hundreds of thousands of membership records into the Force.com platform with some help from Convio Common Ground and Idealist Consulting. Today I'm doing some web work for Missouri Women in Trades and I've been involved in a few other information management projects for local and national non-profits, each in various stages of planning and discussion.
As if this left plenty free time. I've started getting more involved in the social media conversation on Facebook and Twitter for many of these projects. I can't stress the importance of these communities enough. Social networking builds affinity and brand recognition faster than anything else, and that's great. But, it also builds real relationships if the connections are nurtured and approached with a philosophy of giving, sharing, and openness.
I'm taking three classes this spring: Applied Psychology of Learning: Training in Industry, Corporate Strategic and Financial Planning, and the so-called Advanced Photojournalism. I need to get out and take some pics today in-fact.
Last weekend was the first time I've left the states since summer 07. I was privileged to take photos for my brother and new sister-in-law's wedding. Here's one of my favorites:
Here's a recent bit of communication I've been sharing to help people find and connect with KDHX in the community that makes sense for them. Maybe you'll find it useful too:
You can find and connect with your friends at KDHX through:
"Whoa" is the first reaction I get when I show off yesterday's project. I'm astounded at the ease of manipulation in ZuiPrezi, the online, flash-based, zooming and swooping presentation tool. Watching a presentation conjures up images of those neat and just out-of-reach multi-touch interfaces.
Thanks to an reintroduction to FreeMind as a presentation tool by Scott Granneman a few years back, I started to appreciate the ability to move information that isn't relevent to the current point of a presentation out of sight to reduce distractions. I was still able to keep context to the larger topic by showing linked relationships.
Not all information is that simple though, and to force all points down in to singular links sometimes causes me to minimize the importance of other relationships between information. Sometimes it's enough to just show that a relationship exists. And, sometimes I just need to tell a story
ZuiPrezi delivers. The development team has built an intuitive design interface which can be controlled with simple keystrokes almost as easily as with the mouse. Here's a snip of the toolbox:
The basic process is this:
Drop information, images, video, and lines into the workspace
Draw "screens" to control the presentation zoom level and degrees of rotation
Draw a path from presentation start to finish.
Hit escape a few times to change to presentation mode. Click next and the presenter swooshes into and out of your screens to present varying levels of emphasis as perceived by relative object size. The vector nature of Flash makes this possible. Dots don't cut it, as evident by the tools handling of photos and images. Yuck.
This won't remove FreeMind from my toolset. Heck, I'll probably embed mindmaps into my Zuis, as long as the service stays available and reliable. I certainly don't trust it completely yet. I've come back into a saved presentation more than once to find my presentation looking different from how I left it.
Without further ado, here's the current state of the presentation I'm building:
Discussion about the tool is welcome; so is feedback and reaction about the current state of the presentation.
