The Power of Comic Books!!

Posted on 2013/02/17 by markjowen

Wow!

Comic Books are fun!

They are a great visual medium. And they are a great way to tell a story.

One of Jorge Cham’s latest editions in his PhD comic series is on an interview that was held with Keegan Lannon at Comic-Con. Keegan is a PhD student and is studying “the narrative of comic books“. (Yep – it seems that Comic-Con has an intellectual side.)

This edition struck me on many levels:

The Content

Keegan describes his study. It’s on how comic books tell stories. “What does the mind do as it scans across the page and sees all the words, and put something together. What can we learn about information and communicative process by the way narratives tell stories.”

Keegan has even created a Taxonomy of Word Functions in Comics:

Neurolingustic Text – Speech/Thought bubbles
Sound Effects – Motivated/Unmotivated
Narrative Text – Intra/Extradiegetic
Printed Text - Consequential/Incidental

Keegan provides an interesting description of the difference between films, books and comics.

One fascinating thing that resonated with me was the observation that Keegan made about the power of a graphic. People can write many, many words to describe something, when a good graphic and a caption can be just as powerful.

The Presentation

The way that Jorge put this edition together is amazing. Instead of just having a film of the interview, he made amazing use of various ways to present the information.

Jorge uses different ways of capturing various topics into panels. He also emphasises main points by adding speech bubbles, as well as extra drawings.

What could of been a mildly interesting way of capturing information from a PhD student is turned into something very, very captivating!

It’s a well spent 4 minutes and 43 seconds!

The no Bullet Bullet Slide

Posted on 2012/03/20 by markjowen

Reblogged from make a powerful point:

How would you like to come across during a presentation? Check all that apply — Lazy? Safe? Unimaginative? A rule-follower? If you use a bullet slide, you are checking all those boxes. That's what bullets on a slide sub-consciously say about you. "But," I hear you say, "That's what the template made me do…" or "I had to get these points across, bullets are the best way."

Power of Social & an example of “Wisdom of the Crowds”

Posted on 2012/02/26 by markjowen

In a previous post, I discussed how you don’t always get a correct answer to a question you ask to a crowd.

One of the Spark talks given at Lotusphere 2012 was by Mitch Cohen. It was titled “Get Cancer – Get Social”. His wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Mitch’s talk was a good, & inspiring, one. He talked about the part the internet, and social media played, and broke it down into three areas:

Information
Misinformation, and
Support

(Mis)Information

“Believe it or not, someone (can) be wrong on the internet”

The first thing that Mitch did when his wife was diagnosed was to tell her not to look for answers on the internet. In his talk, he tells us that no two diagnosis’ are the same, and that everyone reacts differently. There are a lot of people out there trying to be helpful, and give advice, but it was, really, misinformation. The best thing to do, said Mitch, is ask the questions to the experts – the doctors and oncologists.

Social

“There’s a lot of support you can get”

Mitch talked about Facebook. “You can be sitting at an infusion centre, letting this poison run into you boy, and you could be thinking about that, or you could be looking at the 100 of comments coming in wishing you support.”

Blogging

Mitch’s wife started blogging about what she was going through. She wrote about how she was feeling, how she was handling it, and what she thought about what was going on. Not only did it made it easier for her to tell her friends all about it, it made it really made it easier for Mitch to share it with his friends.

Living Vicariously

Mitch pointed out that going through chemo means you end up being more susceptible to infection Which means that you can’t be around other people. Being able to see what the vacation photos of others on Facebook, and reading their stories really made a difference to his wife.

Thousands of Miles Away

“I wish we were closer, I wish there was something we could do”

Mitch told of the great support they got from their local friends was, but what he found incredibly powerful was the support he got from people thousands of miles away. How people he had never met in person came up to him (at the conference) and were genuinely concerned and interested with what had been going on.

The Spark Talks were, and are, organised by The Nerd Girls. You can see, below, a list of other excellent Spark talks that were given at Lotusphere2012.

Spark Ideas Lotusphere 2012 – The Videos (nerdgirlsrule.wordpress.com)
Wisdom of the Crowds – part 1 : When the wisdom of the many helps the few or the one (markjowen.wordpress.com)
Relationships in social media (markjowen.wordpress.com)
From The Wisdom Of Crowds, To The Wisdom Of Friends (neilperkin.typepad.com)

“Infographic Thinking”

Posted on 2012/02/17 by markjowen

Troy Larson has written a post on Infographics that I like.

If you have read my earlier Infographic posts (here and here), you’ll know that I don’t think much of the majority of Infographics that I have seen.

Well, Troy has the same opinion:

…after surfing the web for a few minutes looking at some of these, you quickly come to the conclusion that most of them suck.

He follows this with the best comment on Infographics that I’ve ever seen…

most people wrongly think that information + graphics = infographics

And then he takes the whole “infographics” discussion to another level…he discusses an interview that Gestalt had with Francesco Franchi, the Art Director of one of Italy’s top financial newspapers.

It’s a great post. Click here to read what Troy wrote (as well as watch the video of Francesco Franchi).

===========

UPDATE

Also just noticed that my friend Ant Clay, from 21apps has also published an amazing post on Infographics. Definitely take a look at it!
http://www.21apps.com/uncategorized/that-aint-no-infographic/

The Truth about Every Presentation

Posted on 2012/02/10 by markjowen

This video reveals the truth about every PowerPoint presentation that has ever been made…

Exciting Times ahead with AIIM

Posted on 2012/01/07 by markjowen

I’m honored to have been asked to be an Expert Blogger for AIIM!

That’s right – I’ve been designated an AIIM ECM Expert. I’ve even got a new purple badge that has been added to my AIIM profile. (It’s sitting on top of the AIIM Ambassador badge!)

I’m very thankful to the editor at AIIM (Bryant Duhon) for giving me this opportunity, and it’s also fantastic to be include with such intellectual giants as Chris Walker, Joe Shepley, Laurence Hart, Cheryl McKinnon, Jesse Wilkins, Jeremy Thake, Christian Buckley, Nick Inglis and many, many more. (For a full list click here).

I’ve been given the OK to publish any post I write for AIIM, also on my own blog (i.e. this one), but with a lapse of a couple of weeks.

At the same time, I’m still very interested in other areas that don’t quite fit the scope of my AIIM designation. If I feel the urge to put fingers to keyboard and write about these, they will also be appearing here.

I’m really stoked about this, and look forward to writing some smart stuff.

Infographics – some examples of REALLY good ones (maybe)

Posted on 2011/12/30 by markjowen

If you have read my earlier post on Infographics, you’ll recall that I bemoaned the fact that some of the so called infographics coming out these days are just not making the grade.

This evening, my good reader, I came across a blog post that showed seventeen examples of “excellent” infographics. Initially I was excited by what I saw, but then, on closer examination, I actually discovered that while some of the infographics were, indeed, visually exciting and really “painted a picture”, some of them were just statistics with a coloured graph.

Infographic #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5 were prime examples of what I have been saying. They give you information in a great way and add value, rather than making you think “D’uh – you could have just given me the raw statistics, or information.”

Infographic #6 and #7: “D’uh – you could have just given me the raw statistics.”

Infographic #8, #9 and #10: Are great representations of the data.They made me really study them to try and get more information out of them.

Infographic #11 and #12 were poor. These were just numbers. That’s all. I wasn’t stimulated to think about what I was looking at. (In short – they were boring).

Infographic #13, #14, #15 and #16. I like these ones. The information present, again, caused me to stop, while my neurons, and synapses, sprang into life.

Infographic #17. At the risk of repeating myself “D’uh – you could have just given me the raw statistics.”

Have a look at the post (click here), and let me know, in the comments, if you agree with what I have said.

Infographics – have they gone too far? (markjowen.wordpress.com)
Deconstructing Infographics (freetech4teachers.com)
Infographics – love ‘em or hate ‘em? (sparkyourinterest.wordpress.com)

Excellent point…Sucky PowerPoint presentations

Posted on 2011/12/15 by markjowen

Here’s an excellent presentation by Jesse Desjardins. He makes some really great suggestions. So much so that I wanted to capture it on my blog. I just hope that more people actually “get” what makes a good PowerPoint presentation.

At the same time I realise that many people need to comply to some “corporate” standard. And, sometimes a PowerPoint presentation is created to be read, or viewed, at a later stage when the presenter is present. I’m not quite sure how to fit those types into the concepts that Jesse (and many others) are promoting.

Watch Jesse’s presentation, and have a think about how a “corporate” (or a “stand-alone”) presentation can be created using these ideas…

A couple of my other posts that discuss presentations:

3 Easy Steps to a Great 20 Minute Presentation (forbes.com)

Infographics – have they gone too far?

Posted on 2011/12/12 by markjowen

We’ve probably all see an infographic that displays “interesting” (or not) statistics in a visual way. (For a selection of infographics, check out dataviz, and visual complexity).

An infographic turns numbers into something visually exciting and meaningful.

Recently I came across an article on the VentureBeat website, by Chikodi Chima, which states that infographics have “jumped the shark“.

In it, Chikodi refers to Edward Tuft, (author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.), who said that successful graphics should do the following:

Show the data.
Induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else.
Present many numbers in a small space.
Make large data sets coherent.
Encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data.
Reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine structure.
Serve a reasonably clear purpose: description, exploration, tabulation or decoration.
Be closely integrated with the statistical and verbal descriptions of a data set.

It seems that many infographics don’t accomplish these, and are being made just for the sake of making them.

Here’s that link to that article…How infographics jumped the shark.

Give it a read, and let me know if you agree.

Infographics – some examples of REALLY good ones (maybe) (markjowen.wordpress.com)
The Rise of the Infographic (makeapowerfulpoint.com)
Storied infographics: Why do they fail? (commetrics.com)

Tips for creating Great PowerPoint slides

Posted on 2011/06/20 by markjowen

When I was at the European SharePoint Best Practices conference in London this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Ruven Gotz.

Ruven is a is a Senior Consultant & SharePoint MVP with Navantis, and gave an excellent presentation on “How to organise effective requirements gathering workshops”.

The subject was interesting, but what I was really impressed with, was the style of Ruven’s PowerPoint slides. They made me listen to what Ruven had to say (rather than switch off and just read what was on the screen).

Ruven’s style impressed me so much that I tried to emulate it recently. It wasn’t such a success.

Thankfully Ruven has just written a post on creating excellent powerpoint presentations.I strongly reccommend that you go to his site and have a read.

Ruven’s post: Can you read that at the back of the room?