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

View more presentations from Chiara Ojeda.

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.

A small reflection

Because I am not of many words, this will be short. I have worked at Full Sail for two years now, and while much of that time has been exhausting and frustrating, I realize that all of that time has also been humbling, incredibly creative, possibly life-altering, and has garnered some incredible friendships (I know that last part is not parallel dammit!). I write this during a reluctant break from what has literally become my favorite thing to do, something I am really freaking great at, and something that fuels a passion for eradicating crap I thought I lost years ago. I speak of course of the tweak, the slide tweak. What started out as honestly just a way to NOT grade has become something of an art, obsession, and calling for me.



I love callings! Yay calling!

I do this all of the time...I take what someone might think are perfectly excellent slides and I tweak them...(at first I took really terrible, awful, mind-exploding in the bad way slides and tweaked them). To me, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing what others are doing (I spend way too much time at the following: Information is Beautiful, Slideshare, speaking.alltop.com, and Stumble Upon's design section) and being inspired by this to create something myself. Sometimes it is seeing what my fellow revolutionaries Alex Rister and Christin Upshaw are up to or hearing that someone is "working on slides." Anything (especially being preoccupied over yet another heart-based run around) sparks the need to tweak (not on meth) in me, and I couldn't be happier.

I always thought being a teacher of writing would be my calling, but then I started teaching Humanities, and now I've taught public speaking for two years. Maybe my calling is just to be fortunate enough to find something I completely love, that I am also completely awesome at, and follow that bliss where it leads me, even if that is Seattle, Wa and a cold, cold, everyday. I bitch and moan about many things that I should just not worry so much about, just thought I'd take a sec and praise the one thing that has brought me complete fulfillment at least in that one little part of me...

Check out my tweaks! Working on a few more!

Today's TED Roundup: Aaron Huey, Birke Baehr, and Zainab Salbi

Now that I am done grading discussion posts, I get to watch TED!

I watched this talk by Aaron Huey a few weeks ago, and it left me in tears. Huey discusses the modern state of Native Americans as prisoners of war. Huey displays raw emotion, applying the Be though Vulnerable TED Commandment expertly. His use of imagery forces the audience to come to terms with their own complacency in a 200 year old war. The visuals completely reinforce his point and paint a picture of a people worn thin by time and circumstance. Truly powerful!



I didn't think I could love TED more, but here comes TEDxAshevilleNextGeneration. This amazing event gathered young people who are passionate and concerned about the world's problems together in a super awesome city for an amazing conference. One of the speakers was 11-year-old Birke Baehr, who aspired to be a football player, but after learning about the conventional farming system decided to become an organic farmer. You know, people gripe a lot about homeschooled kids, but Birke, Adora Svitak, and my three amazing younger siblings (my 15 year old sister, Karen, is a writer, has started her own writer's group, sets writing goals of 50k words per month for herself, and is a budding visual artist) have made me a believer in this personalized form of education. Birke breaks down what is wrong with our food system, what kids can and are doing about it, and how we can proceed in the future, all in five minutes! I am not a huge fan of his slides, but he is 11, so he gets a pass.



Today's final talk comes from Zainab Salbi, who will become my example for storytelling, vivid language, and figurative language from now on. She paints a harrowing, haunting picture of a woman's experience in war, from Iraq and Afghanistan to the Congo and the Sudan. Through her work with Women for Women International, she "learned that the colors and the sounds of war are the same, but the fears of war [are] the same." In particular, it is "The fear of losing the I in me" that haunts the many women she shares this experience with.Open and honest about her fears and experiences Salbi makes the case for bringing women into the post-war reconstruction process. Incredible!