Lightning in a Bottle

Not many entries this summer! Of course, I could say that it’s because nobody is around to read them, but actually it’s because it’s our crazy season. Since June 25, I’ve either taught or helped teach one three-day camp, two one-day workshops, and a five-day workshop. Throw in a week of vacation and there isn’t much time for blogging. Over the next few weeks I have two more camps, four more one-day workshops and a four-day workshop. (You know, teachers may think it’s great to get the summer off, but it’s hard on the teacher trainers!)

The sad part is that it’s also a great learning time for me, and I should be carving out time to share what I’m discovering. For instance, in the week-long multimedia workshop I taught earlier this month, one of the participants was an education professor from a four-year college. He shared with us that when he attends national conferences representing faculty from colleges of education, the cultural norm is to keep Powerpoint slides fairly plain, emphasizing almost entirely text. He said that his colleagues will get after him for putting in “non-content” items such as images.

Wait. Images aren’t content? Sure, we’ve all seen lots of PowerPoint presentations filled with inane pictures that have nothing to do with the content being shared, but that doesn’t mean images should be completely dispensed with. It just means that those who create presentations need to be purposeful with the images they choose to use. The phrase a picture is worth a thousand words has been around long enough to underscore that yes, images are content, and can be remarkably efficient at that.

This would be funny except that the community of people in question are the people who are instructing our new teachers. Arrgh.

So, I’ll try to share more as the summer goes by. I’m learning a lot. Besides, I’m also teaching class on Weblogs, Wikis, and Podcasts on Wednesday, and I certainly need something posted for that!