I put together a Prezi for an upcoming talk, rather than digging out some tired powerpoint slides. If you don't know Prezi, check it out. There's a very reasonable educational license for the full product, but you get a lot for free.
The idea is to describe the yin and yang character of assessment: the scientific ambition of measuring and demonstrating improvement in learning versus a more modest aim to create a culture that values learning and pays attention to what observation is telling us. In the presentation I term these "Demonstrated Improvement" versus "Intentional Evolution." There are techniques and language that belong to both, and in implementation, some that fall in between. This last category would include things like student portfolios, which can be used for rubricked (if that's a word), sliced and diced number crunching, or messier assessment through observation and discussion.
I intend to do a voice-over for this thing when I get the chance. That's new to me, and our web guy recommended a product from Techsmith called Camtasia that I'll try out. I use the free version of their Jing all the time.
Now that PowerPoint presentations have reached their peak in creative expression with the brilliant summit of art embedded below, it's time to move on to other media. In the era of Web Duh Punt Null, new media arrive shiny and gleaming in your in-box about every 10 seconds anyway.
The new kid on the block is Prezi, a Flash-based composition and presentation package that you can use for free, or upgrade to paid packages for more features. In practice, you'd want to upgrade because otherwise everything you create is instantly public. Either way, you can either use an online navigation page or download your stuff along with a desktop presentor to put on a USB drive. If you want to be able to compose offline, however, you have to buy the expensive package. I tried Prezi out last weekend in preparation for a workshop I'm co-presenting at the 2009 Assessment Institute later this month in Indianapolis. It's a great conference for both the presentations and making contacts. It's a very different feel from the SACS meetings (regional accreditor), where you can judge how close someone is to the visit by how much they sweat and the degree to which they jump at sudden movements. By comparison, the Assessment Institute is relaxed and intellectual.
It's easier to show you how Prezi works than to tell you, so I've embedded the draft I've been working on below. You can use the arrows at the bottom to follow the flow, or freely click around, zoom and drag.
The same presentation is here on the Prezi site. The topic of the workshop is strategic planning, and particularly a nice method I learned from Jon Shannon on doing an inventory of stakeholders, their goals, and possible solutions to tactical or strategic challenges. I blogged about that topic in A "Useful Planning Technique." The session is at 10:15 on Tuesday, October 27, and here's the full description:
Stakeholder-Oriented Assessment and Planning Stakeholder-Oriented Assessment and Planning (SOAP) is an approach to assessment and planning that facilitates efficient discussions and promotes confidence and early alignment of participating groups. By identifying the stakeholder-goal landscape relevant to an assessment or planning target, participants quickly reveal and document the existing and desired state of the system.
