Nicole Reinhold wrote:

When conducting research I use several online tools and methods but when presenting the results I'm back offline with powerpoint or pdfs. Whereby it would be great if we could use online tools to make the research findings more interactive, multimedia embedded and so on.

I was wondering if some of you have used online tools to present research findings. I was thinking of a tool with which I easily can create various templates, in which I can insert text (quotes) and images, videos and links. As anybody experience in that area or found an inspiring format of presenting research finding online?

My answer may well be seen as a plug for my paper at the AoIR 8.0 conference on "Playing with the academic format", but anyway... By "presenting the results" do you mean an oral presentation in a conference or a seminar, or publication of results in an electronic journal? Both raise issues. There are many OK tools for creating slideshows for presentations, my favorite is Apple's Keynote, which exports Flash files for web pages. I see, however, many good reasons to limit slides or omit them altogether. Research in cognitive load theory (Sweller) suggests slides most of the time do not help, and may inhibit audience understanding. The exception is figures or illustrations that you talk about. PowerPoint is also critiqued in other parts of academia (e.g., Tufte), and the pedagogues I talk to have a hard time finding studies that show slides help. (If I'm starting a flaming new thread here, so be it.) As for electronic hypertext/multimedia publishing, like it is done in Kairos and other journals or in the works by Kolb, Moulthrop, Miles and others, there are no quick solutions. These hypertexts take time to create -- and they take time to consume (I use Tinderbox for that kind of work). For many fields, time is a more important factor than presentation or rhetorics, so genre experiments are discouraged. For other fields, the presentation approaches an art, so templates would not make much sense. It seems that most e-journals would like a basic text format they can pour into a publishing system and its templates. We have seen some excellent videos on YouTube the last year. They are hard to create, with little automation. I would certainly welcome templates for communication of research results with links and multimedia. But I think we have to build them ourselves. I'm into that -- but not far. For both purposes, I would suggest you are best off with a blog right now. (Some would probably say a wiki.) A good blog system (I like WordPress) is powerful, flexible, and fairly easy to use. You can communicate your results to anyone, you have the archive, and the HTML pages may be turned into a large-screen presentation if you use Opera, or tinker with JavaScript templates like Eric Meyer's S5 (http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/). That said, I hope you prove me wrong :-) --anders -- Anders Fagerjord, dr. art. Associate professor, Department of Media and Communcation, Unversity of Oslo P.O. Box 1093 Blindern N-0317 OSLO Norway http://www.media.uio.no http://fagerjord.no