I am a woolgatherer.
I fritter away my days wandering aimlessly, finding neat things and playing with them.
I wanted to have a place to put ’em, and thought it might as well be this blog … All cool “thingies” will be filed as “Woolgathering”.
“Ewe sheep black and white” by George Gastin – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal branding and how to best market my skills and experience. Here some questions I’ve been processing extensively of late:
I decided quite recently to seriously begin working out where to position myself within highly related worlds of work and self-expression. For me, this means articulating a research philosophy, a teaching philosophy, and what basically comes down to a philosophy of creation in general.
I decided to share the development of my various philosophies publicly simply because I’ve never really heard from anyone else how they came up with their own, and frankly I’d love some feedback.
I’ve begun here with my research philosophy because I only recently really came to terms with my passion for research; I always found it interesting, but wasn’t sure that it was for me. In the past few years I’ve discovered that I find the process of questioning, designing, analysing and reporting research deeply intrinsically rewarding. The whole world is a puzzle, and it seems as though we’ve only recently gained the processing power and vocabulary to piece it together meaningfully–to express its beauty not just to the research community but to doers and thinkers from all walks to life …
Before I present what I’ve come up with so far, here’s some inspiration from a self-styled ‘scienartist’ whose tumblr I find interesting:
Without further ado, here are some thoughts:
Note: nobody paid me to love Prezi. I tried it, I loved it, and I’ve used it again and again …
Prezi has been around since 2009. It’s an easy-to-use cloud-based editor (you can download presentations to present offline) that really changed the way I think about presentations and how the medium of story-telling can affect the impact of one’s work.
I’ve used Prezi for team-based projects in several courses now, and while the occasional technical glitch (e.g., disappearing edits) did arise, collaboratively designing diagrams, mind-maps and developing the navigation of the presentation itself turned out to be an incredibly rewarding process.
Below, I’ve embedded a presentation I worked on this summer with my colleagues Antonia and Diane for a consulting course (IDEA Aircraft cleaning attendants TNA for Airflow Airways on Prezi, Version 1). For this assignment, we pitched our skills as a consulting team to a fictional airline seeking a training solution to improve cleaning staff performance.
I’m incredibly proud of how that project turned out, and I think that the Prezi itself presents the best evidence of our team cohesion. We each contributed our own expertise in terms of content, but created the visual design for the presentation collaboratively. In doing so, we gained an in-depth understanding of each others’ contributions, and found ways to illustrate our argument that tied all of our work together in an attractive, impactful package.
As my colleague Stefan pointed out on his blog, the canvas+camera movement mechanic of navigation encourages the designed to consider the use of potential powerful visual & kinetic metaphors. If you step through the presentation, you’ll see that first presented ourselves and our philosophy as a company, set out the context for the problem we’d set out to solve, our analyses, and our proposed solutions. You can see that the logic of our persuasive argument is realized in the visual design we developed.
That presentation also illustrates one of other attributes I love about Prezi …
Below, I’ve embedded an alternative version of the presentation, IDEA Aircraft cleaning attendants TNA for Airflow Airways on Prezi, Version 2. In fact, this is the one we ended up using for our final pitch. If you step through both presentations you’ll see that for the ‘big show’, we essentially presented our case in reverse. We chose to do this for a number of reasons; the first was that we’d timed our presentation and decided that the best use of our limited pitch time (10 minutes), we’d be better off presenting the meat first.
IDEA Aircraft cleaning attendants TNA for Airflow Airways on Prezi, Version 2
Prezi recently added fade-in animation and 3-D background for presentations. Fade-in animation is a communicative mechanic familiar to PowerPoint users; it allows you to break up content into digestible bits, but show the ‘big picture’ in the end.
3-D backgrounds are something new entirely, and I had a lot of fun learning how to use it. Essentially, rather than working with a single canvas, you can work with 3 layers of canvas. This adds depth to the visual you create, such that different zoom levels can be tied to, for example, different levels of analysis. I made use of both fade-in animation and 3D backgrounds in the presentation Taking Care of Business that I’ve embedded below.
Taking Care of Business (Biech Chapter 4) on Prezi
I think there are definitely situations in which the tone and format of a traditional PowerPoint presentation may be more appropriate than a Prezi. I think that certain audiences have expectations about how a presentation should look and flow, and one should take care only to push back on those expectations when it will increase the impact of your message. Excessive zooming and animation may be distracting for audience and presenter alike, especially if something unexpected occurs during a presentation. With those caveats, I think Prezi has great potential, and I certainly have had lots of fun using it. Try it, you might like it!
Prezi – The Zooming Presentation Editor
In the past year, I’ve become fairly active on LinkedIn; though I have yet to contribute much content of my own, I’ve become an avid consumer of business- and professionally-focused articles and threads.
This morning, as I pulled up the daily digest, I was immediately drawn to this sensational headline: “11 Reasons a 23-Year-Old Shouldn’t Run Your Social Media”. Now, as a 24-year-old aspiring social media guru, I was alarmed and intrigued; the entry-level job market is already relatively small for individuals of my age. What are today’s decision-makers hearing about workers in my demographic? Are new grads lacking specific technical skills? How can these be developed? Perhaps the problem is research skills–what should businesses be looking for?
I usually find Hollis Thomases’s articles concise and informative, but today I was disappointed. Great: another tired, ageist reframing of solid but common-sense advice. I don’t mean to single out Ms. Thomases here, but I’ve seen this rhetoric before, and I am not impressed. I’m going to sum up in 2 quick phrases the substantive arguments so insultingly and tediously packaged in this article:
1) evaluate new hires for their fit to the competencies of the job
2) research social media strategy, like any business strategy, before applying it to your business
A few thoughts for Ms. Thomases:
I appreciate that young business owners may not be the target demographic for a firm that emphasizes experience and competence over the more typical “young and fresh” approach to social media strategy. Here’s the problem: some “new grads” may, in fact, hold decision-making positions earlier than you think. They may not feel ready to “enter adulthood and settle down,” but they may be quite confident in their ability to recognize smug rhetoric and influence your professional reputation. They may also remember who capitalized on “kids-these-days” antagonism to promote a business that had already established credibility by multiple means. Don’t overstate the influence of age on competence. Don’t alienate the young.
Every young small business operator I know who launched themselves into the big scary world of social network marketing now definitely appreciates the power of a systematic and informed approach to online promotion. They all literally spent years developing their network marketing strategies; making mistakes and cleaning them up. These individuals know the value of building online marketing and advertising capacity, but their ventures simply aren’t mature enough to turn to consulting firms just yet.
In short, don’t forget emerging entrepreneurs. They are potential clients. They are potential strategic partners. They are also potential competitors. They are potentially powerful people, and they’re watching you too.
I’ve been putting off the transition from my beloved Google site for months. I’m determined to review beginner PHP before my advanced class begins in mid-August; I figure this move is a good opportunity to review and experiment.