As I said in the introduction this was originally part of a talk I gave without slides. I wasn't in the mood to fight with the presentation software. I was bored with the default slide deck I used. We had replaced the bulb in our projector television and WOW - expensive! I had begun thinking more about our family's impact on the planet, and made a conscious decision to reduce it. (Including the retiring of that projector as a television!) It felt good. We were using less. A couple of green energy calculators indicated that the cost of giving a slide-based presentation was @ $50 per run-through. So yay! I was using less at work too. I felt better to be saving even more resources than before. Because if we use something over and over and over it eventual goes away, right?

Actually, no.

On the web using a resource over and over gives it MORE power. More connections, more relationships to other data provide more opportunities for discovery, identification, analysis, and insight. We can learn that apple can mean many things: if capitalized as 'Apple' it could be a person's name, a music company's name, a technology company's name. If in lowercase it could be one of 7500 varieties of a fruit. Just as Wikipedia provides very helpful 'disambiguation' pages, a starting-point resource 'apple' can help us along the way. We can first choose to focus on the technology company, we can focus on relationships from 'Apple Inc.' which are 'products' and then choose 'iPhone.' Finally we can count the number of relationships between iPhone and 'x' which are of the type 'purchased.' Millions of uses of 'iPhone' and 'purchased' are fantastic - a wealth of information on the popularity of that particular smartphone. And MUCH easier to count if all of the references are between single entities, rather than classes of entities or the same entity distributed across many systems.

In this case the resource is like a sponge. It needs some water to get started - some small use. After it's primed, it starts soaking up water at a much higher rate. When it hits capacity, you can add another sponge, or a bigger sponge to hold more water.

On the web, resources gain MORE power the more they are used. Use them!

One of the best presentations I've ever given was done without slides. I jotted down my ideas on a handful of bright pink index cards, sorted them this way and that, numbered them when I was satisfied, and added brief notes on the back of each to remind me of the metaphors I could use with the audience.

We were more engaged, the audience and I. I know this stuff, and because I could focus on the audience and not on the slides, I could make it more about them. I could adapt based on body language and aural cues. Slow down, speed up, pause for questions and answers and anecdotes. It was a great experience.

I've never let those cards out of my bag since. Just in case.

The index cards that caused panic in the heart of the meeting organizer!

So I've decided to recreate them here on my blog. Brief notes about specific topics. Not an end-all, be-all. Not advanced discourse on academic topics. No 'single source of truth' definitions on what things mean or how you can use them. Just some ideas about things I've learned and the opportunity to engage. I learn more from teaching and I love to learn. Please feel free to ask questions, share answers or anecdotes. If you've come up with a useful metaphor or mnemonic for anything I mention - please share! Anything that helps convey the power and flexibility of this framework is most welcome.

Thanks for reading,
Christine