Craig Vasey has been hard at work using Drupal to produce an online logic textbook as his project for the Teaching and Learning Technology Fellows here at UMW. Since he has Powerpoint presentations he's used before, we worked a bit on how to incorporate them into the text. Seems, though, that the best bet with them will be to attach them to appropriate chapters for two reasons. First, as Powerpoints developed for class they lose their context and meaning significantly when put in the very different context of the book. Second, though OpenOffice happily converted them to Flash videos, it could only convert slide by slide, which lost some of the effects built in to the Powerpoints.

It did get me thinking, though, about where a slide presentation converted to flash could be useful in an online writing space. One thing that struck me as possibly useful is the way a flash video of a slide show could be used to reorient the temporality of reading. That is, traditional print books correlate progression through time with progression down the page: later in time = farther down the page. Putting a flash video into a page lets that switch around so that progression through time has a new dimension to follow: the sequence of clicks to progress through the slides of the presentation. That strikes me as being useful for thinking about content that has a tight temporal progression such as steps in a process or, more particularly, steps in a proof.

With that in mind, here's a look at the steps to convert a slide presentation to a flash video and insert it into a Drupal page. (Just click on each slide to advance it.)

I'd be happier if OpenOffice's export to flash allowed more in the way of navigating through the video--I noticed lots of discussion about this in the OpenOffice forum. I'm hoping, though, that this is a helpful way to approach texts online, and can be a step away from the assumptions of print guiding the online media too much.