Daily Message Sept. 22

Good Morning!

First, a bit of course management business...


I know some groups are working well together and others are having some difficulty. Keeping in mind that we have one collaborative project coming up (in which you have to produce something as a team), please let me know your preferences re: your discussion/peer review group. If you're in a happy and fully functional work group and you'd all like to continue working together, please send me one WebCampus email on behalf of your whole group. If you have one partner you'd like to continue working with and need a third party, or if you'd like to work with entirely new people let me know that, too. Please send me email with your preferences by Friday.

And now for Module 4...

I have to confess to being super-amped to (finally) be getting to Module 4, which marks the official beginning of our opportunities to apply the theory we've been reading and create amazing things.

For this module, you'll choose one chapter that we've already read from Designing Visual Language (that's Ch. 1-7), and you will create an outline of the chapter in PowerPoint. What I'm looking for is comprehensive application of principles from both textbooks in a visually-oriented chapter outline that uses PowerPoint as the development medium.

What I'm not looking for? A PowerPoint presentation as you probably think of it. Not interested in anything that looks like this. Or this. Or any of this. What I am looking for is serious thought and effort in your attempt to take all of the content in that big, fat chapter and present in a visual way that helps readers get the concepts from the chapter without reading it, in 12 little slides.

Three ways to FAIL this assignment.

1. Give me a "chapter outline" that is an actual outline done in bulleted list form on PPT slides.
2. Use a pre-existing Powerpoint template. You must do your own slide design.
3. Present content in a way that is predominantly textual and doesn't embrace the challenge of thinking visually

What we're really after in this project is some serious thought about designing visual language, especially when it comes to non-linear components and data displays. I'm hoping that by the time you've finished this module and are writing your reflection you'll have some new insights into the ways that presenting ideas visually (instead of something that looks like an academic term paper) helps us see and understand ideas differently. Some examples of what I mean:

• Online Dating and the Real "Stuff White People Like"
• The video below is rather long, and I don't expect you to sit through the whole thing (although you might like to.) It offers some powerful evidence of the way changing the way we communicate an idea visually helps change our perceptions of reality. this Red State/Blue State election map series illustrates the same principle.

Some sources of inspiration for this module:

• David McCandless' information design blog, Information Is Beautiful.
• Anything from Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen site, but start with these tips.
• Really Bad Powerpoints

That's it for today. Remember that peer review on those essay exams is strongly encouraged.

Julie