Having a coffee

Tony Karrer commented:

I'm at DevLearn right ... and your post makes me wonder ... if you were here, having coffee with me right now, what would we be talking about?  And who else would you want to sit with to have those conversations?

Interesting question. I suppose one thing is a current job I'm working on: a lot of standalone multimedia PCs in my company are being decommissioned, and expensive CD ROMs training modules are being trashed. My team has been given the task of creating web-based 'versions' of these in a desperately short time. Sponsors and subject experts aren't delighted at this turn of events and don't want to put time into creating something new out of it. They want the 'content' (whatever that means) online and available asap and the paradigm they're thinking of is 'copy and paste'. We've developed our own quick and easy templates for short page turners with a limited number of interactivity types - what some writers call, perhaps disparagingly perhaps not, Power Point Plus. Several of us have been pretty much pasting the text content of these courses into these templates, trying to chunk them better and sneakily reword them into less pompous language as we go.

My particular challenge was that the one I was working on used video extensively to set the scene for what was afterwords some boring and wordy 'tell' stuff. Our audience cannot use audio on most machines but my solution was to fall back on my first hobby - comic strips. I took stills from the courses and added word balloons, captions and some of the cinematographic techniques used in comics like zooming-in closeups. So within a page of the page-turner you'd have another page-turner but in comic strip form. Now that we've been given licence after xxx years to use Flash I'll make the next ones look better, but for now all I use is a link which replaces the current 'frame' with the next. 

So one thing I'd like to talk about is how one might extend the use of comic strip techniques for presentation in learning, and who's doing this? I know page-turners don't  excite designers, but we're stuck with it for the time being so I want to enjoy making them somehow!

Comments

[Barry Sampson]

Sounds like you're having fun! I really like the idea of using comic strips as a learning tool.

There is actually a tool called Storywriter Toolkit that does exactly this. It was developed to overcome a similar problem to the one you faced.

I should point out that I have no connection with the product, just saw it and liked it!

[Clive Shepherd]

Comics are great because they tell stories and stories are memorable and engaging. Comics are also a little different from the norm of photos with text underneath, although not so easy to maintain or localise because the text's in the images!

By the way, I came across another great tool called ComicLife for making comics. Was mac-only but now there's a PC version.