New tweaks next week, but now, a poem in progress

I am working on Tweak Your Slides, the student version. I am not really happy with the end product, so I am going to work on reorganizing and rearranging information before next month. I did fall into some kind of hole of endless nostalgia this week, though, and the result is below. It's only a first draft, and I feel the word terribly makes the whole thing seem rather juvenile. I do like the final lines though. What do you think?

(Image: Per Orla Wiberg via Flickr)

Amazon

Tonight I miss you terribly.
The flesh of your fingers
stained in script and guns
entwined with my flesh,
brown and warm and terrified
that this would be the last time
you held my hand and heart in yours.
I miss your contention,
rebelde spirit that showed me
for only a moment what
life is with a roman candle for a heart.
A moment, a mere glimpse of foam kissing shore
in an expansive ocean of time that
inevitably sweeps the foam away,
A reconstituted nothing—fish food.

Forgive these moments, love. You see,
you took the part of me
that I most wanted you to have.
The girl who, unafraid, wraps
Fairness and Justice like a sash,
cuts off one breast and takes up the bow.

What I did at work today....

While I showed Holly, Jaclyn, and Catherine how to mess around with iMovie and Garageband.

The Scariest Podcast EVER

Professional Communication and Presentation Surveys!

Hey! My students are working hard on their presentations this month. As always, I torture them with surveys. There are only 8 this month--yay! Take a few minutes to give these students some valuable information as they prepare their presentations.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Y69FCJ7
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QX2MP6Q
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/C5RWX9Z
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QYP3Q3Q
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JYCMBWZ
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/C3HPBTL
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/C3LKLYY

Tweak Your Slides, the workshop part deux

Alright! Here it is, version 2.0 of my upcoming workshop on visual design principles for educators. I LOVE these slides. I mean, I think I am seriously in love with just how beautiful they are. I am deeply enamored by the "tight" and clean look of Helvetica Neue Condensed Black all caps at 72 pt. and above.

Yes, I did just enthusiastically proclaim love for a font style and weight. I am off to Body Pump now, but feedback is deeply and greatly appreciated. Let me know what you think!

Tweak Your Slides: Ten Design Principles for Educators (version 2.0)

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Make it a Krispy Kreme Burger

So, no, I was not accepted to the University of Washington's doctoral teaching and curriculum program. Should I be more upset? Probably. Am I upset? Not really. Perhaps it's just getting to an age where I realize life is a constant ebb and flow of triumph and disappointment, and instead of frantically swimming against this certainty, I've decided to move and flow with it, releasing myself to the ecstasy of not really knowing where this current will take me.

Sometimes life is like this, a complex swirly of dirty laundry.
Or, maybe it's because I still have a decent paying job doing something I kick butt at (despite daily frustration and consternation), a healthy and happy family, fascinating and caring friends, and all of my appendages, organs, and body parts intact (oh, yeah, did I also mention I have a kick ass sense of style)? As my cousin heads off to help tsunami victims, leaving a wife and child behind, I can't help but realize that the reason I am not upset is both of the above but even more importantly, it is faith that all falls into a place and pattern in its own time.

But, the rest of the time it's a Krispy Kreme burger.
In honor of said release to aforementioned ebb and flow, I give you Neil Pasricha, of 1000 Awesome Things and his TED talk, The 3 A's of Awesome:


Look for another draft of the WIP Tweak Your Slides workshop this afternoon!

Tweak Your Slides, the workshop

Well, after a productive morning of grading, coffee seeking, and lake walking, I hunkered down and got back to work on the slides for my upcoming short presentation on visual design. I chose to use examples of my old slides as the representations of what NOT to do. I of course had an incredible bounty of amazingly BAD slide shows to choose from. It's a miracle my students didn't show up one day with pitchforks and torches clamoring for my head as a response to the crime of mass murder--I LOVED bullets. Sweet, sweet bullets, so easy to add to a slide, so completely irresistible in their "professional necessity". It's no wonder my first rule is do not use bullets.

Kill the Beast!

Some feedback on this would be super duper duper appreciated. Anyone who does respond gets some of these:

Tweak Your Slides, the workshop:

Tweakyourslides

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Jury Duty!

This post could also be titled, "What I am doing to avoid recognizing that I am sitting in a stark room full of strangers for eight hours." I had a mild heart attack the first time I receive a jury summons at the age of 22. It was not the thought of fulfilling my civic duty that created apprehension as much as it was the idea of being forced to decide the fate of someone who may or may not be guilty of a heinous crime. I believe I was also equally apprehensive about the thought of missing days of school and work, as I have always been quite the workaholic.

So, instead of subjecting myself to these various scenarios, I wrote a strongly worded letter explaining that missing even one class in a graduate program could significantly diminish my ability to successfully complete a course of study. Whoever read that was either deeply moved by my eloquence or just didn't really care much about who got out of jury duty. As long as he or she had made the effort to write a letter in the first place, why not let the concerned citizen (me in this case) get out of serving at this time. The second time I received a summons, I threw it away, believing that just feigning ignorance or claiming I'd moved would be enough to fend off possible repercussions....as far as I can tell, I was right.

When I received my third summons a month ago, I resisted for a moment, recalling previous fears, then just said, what the heck, might as well see what this whole civic duty thing is all about. After a mild panic session upon hearing a rumor that I could NOT bring my laptop, I did a bit of research and found out that while I am not allowed to bring a perfume bottle over 4 oz (that is a butt load btw...), I am allowed to indeed bring a laptop. And, so I sit and write this from a sterile room full of strangers, some sleeping, some working, a few playing Scrabble... one gentleman sternly told a repeated wrong number to please stop calling, then called his provider to block the number and would not tell the operator his social security number because he was, "in a very public place....the jury room actually..."

(What I secretly hope happens....)

I have been using my morning to work on the upcoming 20 minute slide design boot camp/overview I am presenting to the English department in a few weeks. After running a few ideas by friends, faculty, and students, I decided to structure the presentation around 10 dos and don'ts of slide design, focusing on the areas audiences often have the most complaints about and that educators can apply easily, without advanced knowledge or experience in Keynote or Power Point. Here is what I have come up with so far as a rough outline. Look for a first draft by the end of the day....that is, unless I get called up to serve on the trial of the century.


Title: Tweak your Slides! Ten Zen Design Principles for Educators

Do Not
Use bullets
Do Use Text Purposely

Do Not
Use templates
Do create your own

Do not
Use clip art
Do use images that are emphasize realism

Do not
Crowd your slides
Do provide visual breathing room

Do not
Confuse your viewer
Do use contrast to increase understanding

Do not
Use animations without purpose
Do use animation for a reason

Do not
Forget an extra slide costs nothing
Do use the medium to its best advantage

Do not
Confuse your audience
Do create a unified theme

Do not
Make your slides the focus
Do detach by reducing, recording, repeating

Do not
Use a visual medium to convey a textual idea
Do apply the picture superiority effect

Yeah, but when I say constraint, I don't mean myself....

Image courtesy of phobus via Flickr

Boss: Hey, so can you briefly talk to the department about Duarte's principles of visual design.

Me: Oooohh... Excited, how, what, yayy!! I just talked to someone in student development about presentations and students and yay and fun...

Boss: we need something very brief; just cover the major points...if you can do that.

Me: it 's not my fault; I've been conditioned to speak for at least 4 hours at a time :)

Boss: Just talk about why visuals are so important and choosing the right visual to accompany your thoughts. If you go over, I will play instrumental music.

Me: Sure, like for an hour? (I teach at Full Sail, an hour is nothing to me. NOTHING!!!)

Boss: I was thinking 20 minutes

Me: hahahaha.....haaaa...lol. Okay, let me breathe for a second.

Boss: I was going to ask if you were breathing. Think of it as a pecha kucha.

Me: Let's do this!

I am not a writer....weird!

Becoming a "slide tweaker" has been an interesting development in my journey as a student and educator. Interesting in the sense that 1. this was not something I ever thought I'd care about, 2. I have no formal training in the instruction of speech and communications, yet am more convinced than ever that teaching is a natural talent and gift that when cultivated can enable one individual to enable learning beyond their formal education, and 3. interesting in that I am not sure I WANT to teach composition again for a good, long while. I have become obsessed with the transformative power of speech. Watching a visualization, Reading and laying down Lincoln's meaning in The Gettysburg Address in class today gave me goosebumps.

More than that though, tweaking slides, clean design, and impacting, powerful speech have infused every part of my life beyond the classroom. I find myself considering design in other facets of my life, and sorely need to simplify and clean out my personal clutter, both physical and otherwise. I see design everywhere I go now, and I think about why things are and how things are much more now. In another respect, I have learned countless lessons from hours of TED talks, and have discovered a talent and love for public speech that, as that shy kid in every class, and that woman who is still too shy to talk to strangers, fascinates me. I realized on the way to the gym this evening after an eight hour mega-double that I have never really been a writer; I've never associated with that term, nor has that role ever been a part of my identity. Now, this may seem odd, considering that I am an English and writing teacher. I majored in English, and spent seven years instructing others on the skill of composing a piece of writing. How am I not a writer? Well, maybe the answer to that lies in the fact that I have always seen my role as that of thinker. I don't teach others to write; I teach them to unlock their own potential as thinkers and use writing and the analysis of literature as a means to helping them understand some aspect of the world they did not previously understand. Even in school, I was the thinker, the analyzer, the synthesizer of information. Writing was just my way of proving or illustrating this synthesis. More on this later...for now, it's back to grading!

As if I needed proof coffee loves me as much as I love it...

I love coffee. A hot cup of really strong coffee is at the top of my daily to do list, and that first sip of the first cup of coffee is pure, steamy, brown joy. I thought my love of coffee was strictly one sided; I mean, what do I really have to offer coffee that it can't just get from one of its millions of supplicants and adorers? I am just one gullet, one container for the roasted goodness. Well, a few days ago, coffee surprised me by showing me that yes, indeed, it loves me drinking it as much as I do:

(Pictured above: the grounds from my Keurig coffee maker trying to get fresh with me)

I've been busy, part deux

I've been working on my visual resume for about a month now, as part of my efforts to integrate this into my course. We worked on these last month and will work on them in this month's course. The debate is whether this works as a way to get noticed by employers. It is my belief that while this does not replace the traditional CV (find mine here), it can serve as a supplement and a means to showcase one's abilities. I dig it in any case.

Visual Resume

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Slideshare Version


YouTube Version

Fundamentals of Informative Presentations

So, I've been pretty busy the past nine months or so teaching an overload section of my course, Professional Communication and Presentation. This has left me very little time to work on some much needed tweaks and revisions to my online class.

The first empty/taskless moment I found during this my first month with only two sections (one of which has six students), I started working on a series of podcast/videos on informative speaking using Cicero's Five Canons of Rhetoric: Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery.

This series was mostly prompted by an on going and recent frustration of mine. This frustration is with what appears to be a lack of clarity between what it means to inform objectively and persuade. I ask my students during their first week in the online class to develop a plan for an informative podcast of at most four minutes. The plan is a chance for them to ask me direct questions and to answer some important questions about their purpose, audience, subject, and selves. What I have realized after receiving topics ranging from informing the audience of how wrong this is, or how this other thing needs to stop, or how the audience needs to start doing blank about blank problem, I realized that people really didn't understand the difference between informing and persuading. I know everything is an argument, and that even an informative speech is still persuading the audience to view information in a particular way, I never expected topics like these. I expected how to tune a guitar, who invented the telephone, how to record a song using GarageBand, the history of cheese....is there really no difference between these terms? I developed these videos in part to help me figure out that question.

Fundamentals of Informative Presentations, Part One



This first video covers Preparation and Invention. After reading Garr Reynolds' first few chapters of The Naked Presenter, I plan on amending the audio to include his ideas, which are super awesome!


Fundamentals of Informative Presentations, Part Two



This is the one I want my students to really pay the most attention to. I include examples of informative vs. persuasive topics using chopsticks, The Beatles, termites, dolphins, and ocean dumping.

Fundamentals of Informative Presentations, Part Three



Here's my two cents on arranging the intro, body, and conclusion of a presentation. Don't forget a strong hook and a S.T.A.R. moment!


Fundamentals of Informative Presentations, Part Four



I had to break up Style and Memory into two shorter videos because style is such an expansive topic, and I wanted to get both into concrete language and metaphors.

Fundamentals of Informative Presentations, Part Five



Finally, part five breaks down metaphors and concrete language. It includes a shout out to one of my faves, aphorist James Geary.