At the end of last month, I came to the end of my term with UK in a Changing Europe. The programme, which aims to bring the fruits of social science research on UK-EU relations to a public audience, was a great occasion for me to bring insights from my pedagogic work to public and political communication.
Part of that was thinking about different ways to package data and information.
Obviously (since you’re reading this) there’s the blogging, but also Twitter, podcasting, vlogs and graphics. Plus all manner of face-to-face events and formats.
Now that I’ve stopped with quite such a full-on public engagement role, I want to try and bring some more of that experience back into the classroom.
My first port of call has been the graphics, because they remain one of the less-explored avenues to date.
When I started out, shortly after the 2016 referendum, I haven’t really got the hang of it [shock]: I think this is one of my very first efforts:
Click through and you’ll see lots and lots of words and not a huge amount of structure: I’m trying to cover all the detail here, but of only some elements.
However, I also notice that the very next day, I also produced something with lots of empty spaces:
Simple, yes, but not very helpful beyond some groupings.
Since then I’ve produced dozens of the things, with not much more to go on than informal feedback and personal reflection: I’d suggest that this might not be the best way to go about it. Taking a course/workshop would have saved a lot of time all round.
For me, the first big thing was thinking about how to move away from what are essentially lists (like the two above), to a format that makes real use of the visual component to relate elements to each other.
The second was about working more to produce content that met the needs of the people using this: I’ve pitched different graphics to those without any substantial knowledge and to those working closely with the material.
That’s all been well and good and I’ve had a handful of graphics get really big audiences, mainly by virtue of trying to break down somewhat complicated things into simpler summaries (e.g. here and here). Getting retweeted by key influencers also matters, so do think about tagging people in too.
But my changing status has also been an opportunity to revisit what I do, including the template, which was essentially a expedient let’s-use-the-university’s-poster-template choice back in 2016.
What’s new?
The past couple of Mondays, I’ve been posting my new efforts. Here’s the first one:
As you see, it’s not massively different: a simpler title banner, clearer details on dates, versions and sharing rights, plus my Twitter handle and a link to a PDF version (i.e. all the stuff I should always have had in).
The colour was horrible and won’t be used again, but the format does highlight my efforts to try and take the reader through the subject matter.
And as for sticking with PowerPoint? Well, I know how to use it, even if it’s not the most elegant or high-powered.
Next steps
But this new formatting isn’t the core of what I want to do: I’m going to bring this into the classroom.
As you’ll recall, I flipped my Intro to the EU class last year, with somewhat mixed results. A big part of the issues was students not seeing what the point of the contact time previously used for lecturing was.
Enter graphics.
I’m planning to use that lecture time briefly for any Q&A on the flipped lecture (as before), but much more for getting the group to generate graphics on a key question.
Given there’s about 120 of them, that’ll need some snow-balling of groups and for me to investigate some software for sharing graphical content, but I think it’ll be good for getting more active and reflective skills developed by students.
We’re still at early days on this, but I’ll report as it evolves.