Edging Ahead…

Yes, I’m guilty. Of course I am. I’ve bored more people with text-heavy bulleted presentations than anybody should ever have to admit to. But I  was just doing what every kid with a new toy  does. I was trying it on to see what it could do.

I was lucky enough to have Kim Cofino mention “Presentation Zen” to me a year ago when I was working on a proposal for our regional teachers’ conference.   I wasn’t quite ready then to abandon all my work in the name of getting my message out in that dramatic, but Spartan, by my “old” standards, style.  Luckily, my presentation wasn’t selected for the conference, so no one was ever subjected to that last-gasp 20th-century blow-out.

But I’m learning. The message of that presentation was important to me, so I went back in the spring and took another look at it to see what could be salvaged. I found some heartening things through applying some of the principles of “Presentation Zen” as I now understand them.

1) I was able to improve it 100% by simply stripping out the background Theme. What a simple concept! As soon as I saw my images highlighted on that featureless black background, I was hooked. No more “wind over Paris spring” themes for me…

2) I had tried to open with a snapshot of a looming environmental train-wreck, to tie this to a personal life-story paralleling the evolution of the environmental one, and then to use the converging storylines to pitch my own speculative fiction novel, Mai Shangri-La. the result included WAY too many competing messages. Each deserved its own vehicle.

3) In spite of my legacy bulleted style, I found that each slide had a core element that I could keep. By “unpacking” the multilayered images, I could expand one slide into several much simpler ones, all of which could impart their own unique message.

4) Without some of the excess wording, individual slides took on a new vibrancy that thrilled me. So a slide which had packed in a dozen cascading images and a series of expanding bullets became a series of individual slides with one or two words each.

I tried unsuccessfully to export a sample to PDF to display here, but uploads keep failing, so I’m bailing on this and moving on. Trust me, that the new, leaner Powerpoint was a dramatic improvement over the old. Now if I could just become so facile with a blogging platform… :0(

…but leaving it at that was really not very satisfying, so I finally ate crow and went to Dennis, my Divisional TRC (Technology Resource Coordinator), and learned a valuable lesson to buttress my learning about Presentation Zen – and basic Powerpoint use ;0) And the lesson is…USE the resources available to you, including the services of people who’s job it is to support you. It will save a LOT of time and frustration.  Thanks, Dennis.

Here’s a JPEG of just ONE of the original slides from the “Pre-Zen” Presentation (47 slides, all Packed out with words, cascading images, transitions (although I had already learned to pare these down to a single image and slide transition) and sound (thankfully, no typewriter clacks or machine-gun yammer, but still an overpowering background music dominating many of the slides)

And here’s the “kicker” slide from the new presentation (the new Presentation took that SINGLE original slide and “unpacked” it to present just one of the many messages in the original.)

"Fill" for a Future Housing Development on the outskirts of Bangkok. Normal?...

Assignment: “…. find an appropriate image to use in at least one of the classes you teach.  How can visual imagery support your curricular content?”

I’m not teaching as many direct classes these days as technology and available time conspire to draw students into their own worlds and teacher into their own classrooms,  but I interact constantly with students, teachers, parents and vendors, and so these are truly “the classes I teach”.  Regardless of the topic, I often lately find myself coming around to the elephant in the room; the environment , or more succinctly, our blatant and growing disregard for the environment in our pursuit of Consumerism’s Holy Grail.  Recently, it seems like the elephant is becoming a herd, as we crowd in increasing environmental degradation (blogged about last post with a positive-spin response by Doug Johnson in the Blue Skunk Blog),  potential global warming tipping points,  growing disease vectors,  and possible environmental collapse.

Yesterday, Stuart H. Scott, in an address to HS students at International School Bangkok, added another “mother of all elephants in the room” – the spectre of actual human extinction if we continue the “BAU” course. For the first time since Al Gore raised the red flag for many of us,  I watched an adult literally choke up talking to kids about Catastrophic Failure Modes and the real possibility of a future United States unable to feed its citizens.  It’s looking increasing likely, from where I stand, that the elephants are truly about to run amok…

I wrote a book about my emerging convictions around this topic, and when I stalled out at getting a publisher, I decided to go it alone.  I was able to meet the design requirements for the Interior file of a POD book (great for the environment), but when I came to the cover image, I was stuck. I wanted an image that would convey a sense of the impending catastrophe  the book explores while hinting at the wonder that still exists in nature and the the tentative promise of redemption through a higher power, be that divine, or human-inspired.

In the end, I chose an image of my own, grabbed quickly around the helpful assistance from my 18 month-old son. For me, this image will always represent the sense of chaotic purpose driven by a growing sense of impending doom I was feeling as I tried to breath life into my initial literary “creation”. Although the meaning may be a large part of only my own internal “soul-map”, the image neatly encapsulates one of the core messages I had spent 190,000 words trying to articulate. Does it work for anyone else? I guess that’s a question that only someone who has read the book might answer…

SUNY EDC 604: Visual Literacy: Effective Communicators and Creators

“Write a reflective blog post on how the courses to date in this program have changed your teaching for the new year.

This blog has languished since the end of the last SUNY course at ISB in May, and now I have to conclude that frankly, the two SUNY courses we completed last year have NOT changed my teaching for this year.

I’ve been asking myself why – even before this question became a course assignment. It’s not that I’m not interested in helping kids “achieve their academic potential”.  It’s not that I’ve lost sight of ISB’s mission to foster “passionate, reflective learners”. It’s not that I’ve given up on our collective goal to help develop kids into “caring, global citizens”. And it’s not that the courses, in of themselves, weren’t  engaging, informative, and fruitful in terms of raising my awareness of new tools and technologies available to me and my students.

So what is it? In a nutshell, it’s a growing sense of impending doom; a feeling that we’re being overwhelmed; and not on the technological front, although certainly it’s become increasingly difficult to keep up with the weekly round of enhancements to online database interfaces, electronic book readers, all-in-one USB devices and “i-everything”.  Instead, this fall, I am overwhelmed by the following;

• I am concerned about the resignation to the inevitable I’m seeing in  my immediate “sphere of concern”.  At the beach that I could once keep reasonably clean by picking up two bags of trash each visit, I now find four to be the norm.  In my small off-campus housing development, rats have become new and unwelcome residents and I feel alone in fighting their encroachment.  I’ve given up trying to maintain on my own a small public park space at the entrance, and it has now become a rampant, weed-choked jungle.
• I am dismayed by the escalation of disregard I am seeing for the larger local environment. I live 20 minutes from this tiny western school enclave, and in my daily commute (by SUV!), I see streets becoming ever more congested and garbage-strewn, roadsides becoming defacto waste-dumps, and once pristine rice-paddies being paved over with first a meter of household garbage (pix to prove it), then a meter of fertile topsoil that should be growing a crop, and finally, two stories of glass and concrete that I fear will become Thailand’s Love Canal.
• I am staggered by the sheer global scale of irreparable damage to the environment I see perpetrated in support  of “business as usual” . We need to maintain “BAU” to support our insatiable demand for superfluous consumer products, unnecessary technology-laden “infomedia” capabilities  and an inappropriat global jet-setting lifestyle. A recent report by the BC Forest Service in Canada projects by within 10 years, the Pine-Beetle infestation will have destroyed 71% of all extant BC Pine Forests. That will bring about shocking changes in the appearance, climate and economic viability of Canada’s richest province.
• I am appalled at the scope of change sweeping the planet as a result of the above, from the speed of arctic sea-ice melt (a trend that’s, thankfully reversed slightly in 2009)  to the routine collapse of Antarctic ice-shelves, to the inexorable upward creep of atmospheric CO2.

Read James Howard Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” (this link to the Rolling Stone article, but we have two copies of the book in ML) and consider how prescient he seems now to have been so far. Read his new novel “World Made by Hand” and consider what’s going to be important if his vision of America in 20 years turns out to be even partly true.

Then ask yourself, “How can I best help students achieve to their academic potential, become passionate learners, and prepare them to be caring, global citizens in a world which might not have functioning electricity or adequate freshwater – even at their soci0-economic level?”

Should I continue to obsess about flavor-of-the-week technological wizardry, or should I concentrate on rubber-meets-road learning skills that will transcend “the long emergency”,  when being able to learn, from a technology not dependent on electricity, how to purify unsafe drinking water, will be a skill more prized than knowing how to assemble a cloud-based mashup of irrelevant extrivianza?

I haven’t changed much about how I’m teaching this fall – except the time-frame within which I’m placing it.  I’m trying to keep my finger on the pulse of new technologies for information seeking and learning, but I’m concentrating on personal connections, practical learnings and transferrable skills that I can impart regarding the already rich array of tools available to our students.

This places me squarely in the left-hand column of Greg Craven’s Magic Grid Machine if you were to exchange his “Significant action now” and “Little or No action”  to combat climate change with “Hedge your bets with traditional vs. technological learning tools” and “Put all your eggs in the technology basket”.

Whether global warming is going to lead to uncontrolled and irreversible climate change is still, unfortunately, a matter of debate (albeit mostly from “outlier” opinion-leaders).  But using Craven’s irrefutable logic, I’ll fight to preserve the best of the past while critically examining, and implementing where it proves really useful,  technology’s promise for the future.  We’ve already made huge changes in the way we do business in our Main Library from 5 years ago.  This year we’ll concentrate on fine-tuning those rather than introducing a host of yet newer experiments in learning.