Video Overview of The Shape of Knowledge

I wanted to create a fast and easy entry point to the content of my eBook The Shape of Knowledge. I decided to make a video but I didn't want to do a traditional PowerPoint presentation - too boring - so I created a Prezi for the visual portion of my presentation.

If you're not familiar with Prezi, it is a visual presentation platform that lets you layout your content on a big whiteboard, in any way you want. Then you create a presentation path through the space, zooming in, zooming out, panning back and forth... there are tools that make it easy to create this path, including simple animations within individual frames. It is a real playground for the imagination, and the basic version of the service is free to use.

I like Prezi because I am very visual - that's why I am focused on shape and structure. What I liked about using Prezi as the vehicle to tell my story is that it let me layout my visuals the way I see them in my head, as a tree. But the presentation path is, by definition, a 'line' shape. This made my presentation both a story and an example of the story's main message: that there are best practices in knowledge shaping that make the transmission of knowledge more effective.

Best practice #1: Pick the best shape to store the expert knowledge. My Prezi shape is a composition tree.

Best practice #2: Prune the expert knowledge to fit the context of the current situation. I ended up breaking my story into two parts, the first focusing on the conceptual foundation and best practices, the second focusing on implementation. The unnecessary content was pruned away during the creation of each part.

Best practice #3: Present the solution with the simplest shape possible. The shape of my solution is a line, a linear path that represents my story-line.

I created narration using Adobe Audition and put the videos together using Techsmith's Camtasia. The videos are posted on YouTube.

Here is Part One:

Here is Part Two: