… well, maybe not quite,  but I actually had a really good time, especially in the first workshop,”Infographics and visualization tools for language learning,”   by Faith Marcel.

First off, this is not to throw shade (as the young people say) on the other two workshops.  They were both excellent, but  while they were about technology, Faith’s actually was technology.  I’m going to try to sort out in my own mind why it worked so well.

I think the main thing was that there was just enough structure to keep me on task.  Faith began by  presenting us with some infographics she had used in teaching.  She talked briefly about how and why she used them.  Her commitment and enthusiasm were clear, but she didn’t overpower us with her observations.  In the second stage of the talk, she directed us to websites containing infographics.  In the third, she introduced sites which we could use (for free) to create our own .  Within this framework, she made herself available to those who had questions, but those who were comfortable working on their own were free to experiment.

I guess for me it was the perfect i+1:  enough new information to spark my interest, but still an amount I was able to implement without extra support.  I had a very productive session: I found many graphics that I thought my students would like and posted them on the class Facebook page.  I hope they are as excited about them as I was.  I joined Pinterest, even though I’m not really sure exactly what Pinterest entails.  I updated my Bitstrip avatar to keep pace with these new developments.  The point here is that there was no tension between what I was supposed to be doing and what I wanted to be doing.  Work, entertainment, and the new skills blended seamlessly.

I ended the session working on my own infographic.  I appropriated a timeline of North American Popular Music and replaced the musicians with silhouettes of black cats.  Well… baby steps.  You might have noticed that I have created my own infographic as an illustration for this set of posts.  That is an Emerald City background (representing the shiny but perhaps fraudulent world of technology), superimposed on which is a Bitstrip of me.  I am in the corner because I couldn’t find a full-body Bitstrip that fit.  I hope you like it.

I have warned all family members that their timelines are soon to be bombarded with infographics, many of them with cat silhouettes.