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Prezi is a zoomy, whooshy new-ish presentation tool. Instead of the Powerpoint-style linear slide-by-slide structure, which dates back to the days of physical slides, Prezi presentations show parts of a large canvas in a completely non-linear way. (Interesting how often new tech looks like the old until the possiblities of the new are realised. When I first saw Prezi, I was reminded of the way early printed books were designed like manuscripts, until the potential of the new tech was grasped. Not saying Prezi is quite up there with the arrival of printing, but I was impressed by it).
I’ve found Prezi quite tricky to learn, and think I have a long way to go, but it has great potential. I’m thinking of using it for a virtual gallery of University characters, if my skills can match my vision. However, I’m not going to stop using Powerpoint. Sometimes a presentation falls naturally into a logical slide progression. Sometimes I need something simple for when I am presenting at short notice. Sometimes I don’t want the audience to be distracted by the new toy. And there are questions about accessibility to which I haven’t found answers, a concern if embedding presentations on the web.
Prezi is not a solution to Death by Powerpoint. People create boring presentations because they haven’t thought about the audience and the outcome properly; Powerpoint is perfect if you want to create an overwhelmingly wordy, dull and unreadable slideshow, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve seen many brilliant presentations using Powerpoint.
Glad I wasn't at this event! (photo from flickr, by Innovation Journalism, under CC attribution licence)
It would be very easy for a poor presenter to create a horrible presentation with Prezi. Instead of the illegible overload of jargon being read out, we will face Nausea by Prezi, motion sickness from inappropriate lurches and zooms around the canvas, too many fonts, too much going on …
If you want to give Prezi a try, the Prezi website is very helpful. Or check out this great simple intro from The Wikiman, which helped me to get started, lots of good advice.
Collections in a Cold Climate 
When you say gallery of University characters, how do you mean?
I think Prezi has lots of potential for this sort of thing, and it’s realtively easy to do using hidden frames. If done right you don’t need a ‘path’ either – people can just click where they want to go.
A big key to the ‘prezi as grand canvas’ thing is to have an absolutely masssive, high-res image as your background – this allows you to drill down to the detail.
Thanks for your comment! I’m thinking about a virtual gallery of our past Vice-Chancellors and other luminaries with a picture of each and a little text biography next to it. have you seen anything similar? I may not use Prezi at all for this, but it did seem like a nice idea. I suspect having the massive high-res image may be a bit of a problem.
Well as @girlinthe said on Twitter, my ‘Technogeek’ map of the library Prezi uses the same principle (which is, in fact, explained in the very post you kindly link to above!).
You could avoid the massive image issue by using a plan white back ground in Prezi itself, then uploading PDFs of picture frames, putting PDF images of the staff into those picture frames, then having a box next to each one with the text written in. It would be very easy to to do – just create the first frame and text-box, get them to the size you want, and then duplicate them the requisite number of times. Then fill in all the frames / boxes with relevant stuff.
(You could even put a door in there somewhere, to make it look more like an actual art gallery… 🙂 )
I think your fab map is brilliant, but a bit beyond my capabilities. What I was thinking of was a canvas in maybe grey or blue, with the framed portraits and some nice text. Like the walls of a gallery, but not trying to reproduce doors and building structures. So your suggestions in para 2 are brilliant!
Well I’d say your plan is emminently achieveable!