Working on this Thing, I decided to take a closer look at the listed hosting sites. Slideshare is well laid out and really user friendly as you can either browse slideshows alphabetically or by topic. Because it's connected with LinkedIn, the slideshows it contains tend to be very business and management orientated, but there's also good content on food, health, sports, art, and personal development.
Authorstream can be searched by category or by keyword, or by clicking on various options such as 'most liked' or 'most viewed'. The one thing that struck me however is that most of the presentations on this website seem to have been created to promote a service or a product. So if you happen to be looking for cleaning services in Toronto, or the best bridal make-up services in Dubai, Authorstream is the site for you! It's also worth noting that the presentations won't work on Internet Explorer.
While Slideshare and Authorstream allow you to view slide shows without having to log in, with ResearchGate you have to create an account or sign in with LinkedIn or Facebook before you can access any content. If you choose the latter option, ResearchGate wants permission to use your name, photo, headline, current positions, and email, and if you say no - you've guessed it, you cannot access the service. So long, ResearchGate.
Sandbox gives free access to content, which differs considerably from the previous three. This hosting site acts as a repository for something called Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and contains lesson plans for that Framework, or ideas and examples to teachers for incorporating the Framework. You cannot really browse the content, instead, you search it by selecting options from a fairly complex set of drop-down menus. The resources are all in PDFs which you can download for free.
The Jisc Store website has a nice clean design. It contains a mix of free and fee-based resources and these can be videos, photographs, PDF-files, word documents, slide shows, or a combination of all or any of these. However, except for the presentations highlighted on the homepage, you can only explore content by a keyword search, which I found a bit difficult since I didn't quite know what type of material the website contained. I tried a few random keywords, and 'archives' brought up among other things a PDF-guide to the National Archives in the UK, a video guide to sharing, archiving or re-using sensitive data, and photographs from the official archives of the United Nations. You will need to download the files you want to your PC or mobile device before you can view them. As an educational resource, this seems to be the best and the most useful of the sites listed in Thing 17.
I found this Thing quite interesting. I had no idea there were so many hosting services available for presentations, and I enjoyed exploring their content. However, my overall impression is that many of them are either very generic or very specialised, and before sharing your work it's worth ensuring that you pick the right hosting site for the purpose. For example, if I wanted to share my presentation on estate collections with a wider audience, of the sites that I explored only Jisc Store seemed like a reasonably good fit.
Image credits:
Image 1: Pixabay under Creative Commons Licence CC0
Image 2: Wikimedia Commons
Authorstream can be searched by category or by keyword, or by clicking on various options such as 'most liked' or 'most viewed'. The one thing that struck me however is that most of the presentations on this website seem to have been created to promote a service or a product. So if you happen to be looking for cleaning services in Toronto, or the best bridal make-up services in Dubai, Authorstream is the site for you! It's also worth noting that the presentations won't work on Internet Explorer.
Sandbox gives free access to content, which differs considerably from the previous three. This hosting site acts as a repository for something called Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and contains lesson plans for that Framework, or ideas and examples to teachers for incorporating the Framework. You cannot really browse the content, instead, you search it by selecting options from a fairly complex set of drop-down menus. The resources are all in PDFs which you can download for free.
The Jisc Store website has a nice clean design. It contains a mix of free and fee-based resources and these can be videos, photographs, PDF-files, word documents, slide shows, or a combination of all or any of these. However, except for the presentations highlighted on the homepage, you can only explore content by a keyword search, which I found a bit difficult since I didn't quite know what type of material the website contained. I tried a few random keywords, and 'archives' brought up among other things a PDF-guide to the National Archives in the UK, a video guide to sharing, archiving or re-using sensitive data, and photographs from the official archives of the United Nations. You will need to download the files you want to your PC or mobile device before you can view them. As an educational resource, this seems to be the best and the most useful of the sites listed in Thing 17.
I found this Thing quite interesting. I had no idea there were so many hosting services available for presentations, and I enjoyed exploring their content. However, my overall impression is that many of them are either very generic or very specialised, and before sharing your work it's worth ensuring that you pick the right hosting site for the purpose. For example, if I wanted to share my presentation on estate collections with a wider audience, of the sites that I explored only Jisc Store seemed like a reasonably good fit.
Image credits:
Image 1: Pixabay under Creative Commons Licence CC0
Image 2: Wikimedia Commons
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