Daily Archives: July 14, 2006

I've been enjoying the holiday break and spending some quality time with the family. I went to Teachers Golf Day on the Monday at the wonderful Murray Bridge Golf Club. I was my usual inconsistent self mixing in two birdies with some atrocious holes including sailing a long tee shot over the out-of-bounds fence onto someone's gravel driveway. On Tuesday we took the boys to see Over The Hedge at the cinema. I still marvel at the amazing animation in children's films these days especially after we saw Cars the other week as well. The first ten minutes of that movie were a sensory spectacular - I loved the realistic shine and gleam on the animated cars as they jockeyed for position on the precisely detailed track, putting even an X-Box 360 to shame. I still have to consciously remind myself that the "wow" factor I experience isn't necessarily the same for my sons - in fact, because it is so "real" I wonder if the blurred distinction between the real world and animated world is impossible to detect in their malleable minds. Certainly, in my youth, cartoons like The Roadrunner Show and Huckleberry Hound didn't have that problem.

Every evening though, I fire up the laptop and spend some time tweaking and preparing for my blogging workshop at the upcoming CEGSA conference. Now North Americans might all head to NECC but in this part of the world, this conference is a big deal. So,I've been fussing over a Powerpoint slideshow that will serve as a backdrop/brain prompt/presentation tool and trying to observe some of the ideas and philosophies I've read over at Presentation Zen. I'm trying to keep text to short memorable phrases (Be a contributor, not just a consumer) and a simple colour scheme in line with the "less is more" approach. I went hunting through the Creative Commons section of Flickr for some handy images and ended up looking at Leigh Blackall's Networked Learning images. I loved the overcast sky on the first pic and that became the genesis of a simple idea for my own presentation. Armed with our Canon Ixus 500, I went out in the backyard and took some shots of the afternoon sky to use. My youngest child, Joshua, followed me out and I ended up pushing him on the swing for a fair while. This worked out well because the weather and clouds kept changing, presenting me with new potential backdrops.

One thing leads to another.... (Leigh's image first, followed by mine)
What's the point of this post? Not too sure but I think I've been somewhat influenced by the Daniel Pink book, "A Whole New Mind." If anyone couldn't tell, I've just finished the section on Design which is influencing the way I'm going to present my message. I've also read Story and some of my diagrams like my QuikMap of my Commenting Community will help with that aspect. Now to keep reading the section on Symphony to pull the whole thing together.