Arriving at Yokohama International School I was confronted, 2 weeks in, with our kick-off Back to School Night. The three of us second grade teachers crammed 50+ attending parents into one small classroom, on unfortunately petite chairs, and proceeded to stumble our way through a Powerpoint.

It felt stilted, like many of these sort of events. Being largely scripted by the content of our slides, parents left having likely little sense of who we -their children’s teachers- were. We certainly got no sense of who our students’ parents were.

While nights like these are framed as an introduction to the year, with a taste of its curriculum, philosophy and so on, in the end I believe most parents come wanting to get a sense of who the teachers are, and for teachers, the best takeaway possible is to begin building partnerships with your students’ families.

The next year was much the same. We added a few words and maybe a picture or two to the Powerpoint (as embedded below). But basically, we stood and fumbled along unsatisfyingly.

The next year a different directive came through. We were asked to meet with our students’ parents separately, in our own classes. The idea that the primary purpose of the night was actually meeting the parents had come to the foreground, and there would be no more hiding behind the Powerpoint, and the words of my peers.

At first I was intimidated. I hadn’t done it this way before and wasn’t sure how to play it. I took a look at our previous presentation and felt the weight of standing and reading through the slides.

A Sloppy Joe: Food that makes you feel as good as its design. From Joyce Godsey on Flickr.

A Bento Box: Food that makes you feel as good as it looks. From Taiyo Fujii on Flickr.

Then I recalled a great talk I’d been to some months earlier. My friend Christine had invited me to an evening lecture at the Apple store in Ginza to see Garr Reynolds, author of the much-lauded Presentation Zen. Garr spoke at length about design principles, none of which were particularly new to me in and of themselves. Simplicity, contrast, line, balance… I remember a particularly notable comparison between images of a bento box and a sloppy joe, and his continued analogy of how you feel once you’ve consumed one or the other. What was new about his talk was the application of these same design concepts to presentations. He asserted that reading from the screen was neither necessary, nor effective. Instead he advocated, as I understood it, for the use of beautiful, resonant images with key words only or no words at all. Images which evoked directly or through juxtaposition the sense of what you were discussing. For me, it clicked.

Recalling this, I started to get excited about reinventing my presentation for the parents that night. I adored the way searching Flickr by conceptual tags, associated with the content I wanted to speak about, brought up suggestions of creative, nuanced and evocative images, whose indirectly associated content I would never have come up with independently. I felt like I was collaborating in my image selection with all the photographers who somewhat abstractly tagged their art works. Using these images, with key words written in color-tones drawn from the photos, I put together the following presentation, as a backbone for my talk.

What followed that night was undoubtedly the best such evening I’d been involved in. The key words on the slides were more than enough to scaffold my talking points, and the beauty and sometime humor of the images created a much more personal and casual tone in the room. I was able to speak to the audience, instead of reciting the slides, and react to their responses with far greater flexibility and sensitivity. Combine that with meeting only the parents of my students, and I’m sure we both came away with a much better sense of who each other were than in years past.

Having changed my tack to this style of approach, I will never go back to a conventional Powerpoint format. Go Zen.

That was Zen. This is now.

Many apologies for the title of this post.

[pinterest]

Note: I started writing this post over a month ago during my winter holidays, but things sort of got away from me and I had no chance to complete and publish it until now. Gomen nasai.

Personal Branding: What’s private, what’s public? I’m sitting here by the beach in Hoian, Vietnam. The surf is crashing, the surfers are crashing. The computer thankfully, is not.

It feels wrong in many ways to be thinking about personal branding and online presence while in a place like this, but that contrast is sort of where my thoughts are on it now anyways. The act of doing it illustrates elements of my thoughts and concerns about the act of doing it. In a previous post I started to reflect on personal branding, and particularly focused on that little square centimeter of screen-space, my avatar. I got some really interesting feedback and discussion out of it. Immediately, my friend Kevin asked the question: “Unless you’re selling something, is there a point in having consistent or meaningful self-branding?”.

Awakening the Fire, by Kevin Ledo

Kev is an artist, usually a painter, and has been pretty active in promoting his work online. In his work, he most certainly can benefit from online promotion, in finding his audience. Mine is different. As an educator, I’m not necessarily driven to find a broad audience. My main audience is my students. Until a few years ago for most educators it was our students, and perhaps our immediate peers, who would have been the only audience. But now, I feel those lines are not so clear.

This blog is a clear manifestation of the multiplicity of audiences. I write it as a reflection, for my own benefit, no doubt. But it is online. It is public. I value -and to a degree expect- interaction with others around these ideas. My blog is not a private journal. It may focus largely on subjects related to education, but the interactions and readership I’ve seen clearly stretch beyond that field, and issues pertaining to education are clearly of interest to a wider spectrum of people. As I wrote about here, the increasing ways in which my life unfolds online, through twitter, facebook, other communities and now this blog, means that inevitably there is a pressure of convergence between professional and personal life. Hence the illustration of my sitting on a beach putting down these thoughts. A personal time, given over to professional thought. The more online I am, in more and more ways, the more transparent my life becomes, and the more the professional/personal lines blur. Sort of whether I like it or not.

So, in answer to Kev’s question, I suppose that subject to the expectations of your profession, when you interact online you may end up feeling as though you’re always potentially selling yourself to a future opportunity. In education at least, it seems that the huge majority of employers use a range of online tools to learn more about their potential peers. And knowing this, I can’t help but consider them part of my possible audience. That doesn’t mean that I need to edit my work to meet their imagined expectations. But I expect that everything about me that’s ever surfaced online will be permanently available. Transparency is here, no matter what you may delete (check the Way Back Machine for a rude awakening), and I do believe that’s mostly a good thing. And so my brand, whatever that is, gets increasingly complex.

Branding may no longer be this simple, but I think it's just as permanent. But why those cowboys want to brand their dog is anyone's game. Image: The Branding Iron by Thomas Hawk on Flickr.

A sticky point for me is the term branding I think. I like the way Elif put it to me, as a misinterpretation or exaggeration of the idea of presentation. It may be semantic, but it sticks with me. The idea of my needing a brand seems disingenuous. The notion of a brand feels like a catchy way to summarize myself for a presumed audience. Concern about branding seems to suggest spending increasing time and energy promoting, contextualizing and positioning what I do, as opposed to just spending more energy doing it.

Branding for me was easier in the past. When you’d search for my name, there I was, right at the top. The rise of a certain senatorial candidate from Maryland put a decisive end to that prominence. For a while he asked me to put a link on the front page of my site (formerly at http://www.jamieraskin.com) and then, when I lazily let it lapse for a few days, he registered the domain. I was not pleased. But if I ever wanted something to bury references to me online, having a senator with your name helps a fair bit.

If my brand, such as it is, is inevitably going to come gasping to the surface, I feel the need to take it by the reins. [pinterest]