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quick thought writing

Taking A Day Off

Thursday 11th June

I took a day off with my family. It was planned that we would go out to Liverpool to look around the Tate, taking the train whatever the weather, but as it turned out it was a gorgeous sunny day. Sunglasses all around for the three Ryders, and our daughter was especially enjoying the new places that we passed walking along the dock towards the gallery. It was around her snack time when we arrived, excited because this was the first time that we had taken her to a gallery.

We stopped for a cuppa, she ate her rice cake and drank some water…and promptly fell asleep.

Categories
quick thought

Bad Powerpoint

A short post and a few thoughts for today. I was reviewing my business notes a few days ago and realised that I have delivered nearly 40 First Year Development Workshops at the University of Liverpool. That means I’ve met and worked with over 1000 new PhD students at the university! A key component of the workshop is communicating research ideas, and one way we do that is through a group Powerpoint presentation. We help participants think about how to do this well, and start that process by sharing the following video:

I don’t use Powerpoint a lot for my work any more; I like the spontaneity of having a few key points in a talk or workshop that I’m trying to explore with participants, and being free to work towards those points in a variety of ways. I think that I can do this better with flipcharts and boards rather than a pre-determined series of images and text.