Thing 14: Sharing research online

In this Thing we will take a brief look at some online sharing sites, namely: Slideshare, Note & Point, and Speaker Deck. Each of these are websites where learning material, mainly presentations, can be shared to the internet community - this allows for much wider access to the content than local publications from the University or conference proceedings.

Slideshare:
I have used slide share many times when looking for information regarding specific scientific topics where I am trying to get a quick, structured overview of something. Since I am a fairly weak reader, I usually struggle with large amounts of text, and so having a multitude of presentations with small digestible chunks is very helpful! I would use this site to share (if allowed) any material I had presented for lectures at a university or academic institution.


Note & Point:
Upon first looking at this site, I was quite impressed. There are three main categories that are immediately shown; Keynote, PDF & PowerPoint - each ways of producing a presentation. What follows are a series of presentations on a variety of subjects (though most seem to be business / entrepreneurial orientated). These are all very well produced and are very easy to learn from. The few presentations I looked at seemed light on content, but that is probably because I am used to hefty, text heavy academic ones, rather than presentations suitable for general public use and learning. One particular one I liked is called 'Stopping the Bite' and is about malaria prevention. I would use this site to share (if allowed) any material I have produced that had a public outlook, and was trying to communicate a simple message. I would also use this site to gain inspiration on formatting a presentation in a way that looks original, professional and appealing!


Speaker Deck:
At first glance, this site seemed similar to Note & Point, with tiles showing a variety of presentations, all of which seemed very well put together. However, these is also a bar along the top which splits the presentations into categories, including: Featured (home page), Business, Design, Education, How-to DIY, Programming,  Research, Science, and Technology. Having had a look at some of the presentations, they seem to vary in quality a fair amount - one that I quite like the look of was Tapes To Digital - a company offering VHS tape to DVD conversion services. There is a pretty major issue though, and it is that a large amount of the presentations are written in Japanese! A problem for me because I can't read or speak it. Overall, the two previously mentioned sites hit the target for what I'd like to produce, and so I wouldn't use this one, unless specifically asked to.

Thanks so much for reading this weeks post! Here's a picture of a cool flower that my granddad has at his house - we're not sure what it is so please comment if you have any ideas!