Pre-CCCCs: My presentation as a comic

Loyal readers will recall that I was somewhat disappointed about the technology options (or lack thereof) at the CCCCs this year. I’m not wholesale against writing a “traditional paper” for a conference like this, but I just didn’t think it made sense given my topic, which is about some of the challenges of dealing with my local tech support/ICT folks in setting up a server for WPA stuff. And really, I think it’s much less about “technology” than it is about “identities.”

Well, what I decided to do was make a comic book. Here’s a link to it.

I am very curious to see what people say about this. I have shown it to a couple of folks around here and have received very positive reviews, but I also can imagine people showing up to my panel (and btw, since I’m talking at like 9 am on a Saturday, I’m not expecting hundreds of people). I can easily imagine a lot of “Whhhhaaaa????!!!!”

Anyway, a brief Steven agenda (as if you care): I arrive on Thursday in time for the traditional St. Martins’ party, I’m at the conference all day on Friday (well, with very special dinner plans I’ll probably post about on my unofficial blog), I present on Saturday, and then I turn into a tourist. Stay tuned for details.

5 Replies to “Pre-CCCCs: My presentation as a comic”

  1. I think it is a great way to address your topic–it is unusual (I would guess) for a conference like this and it was interesting enough to keep me reading to the end. I think the medium works well with the topic.

  2. I’m with Kelly, especially considering that I was not able to attend CCCC’s this year and have had similar issues with our IT Department. I’m sorry I missed your talk, but the strip was well-designed and informative.

    On the bright side, after several years of begging and pleading and general gnashing of teeth, we now have an “experimental” university server that can handle MySQL/PHP. Yippee. Of course, we’re still having some trouble working out the details, but we seem to be moving in the direction I like.

    Thanks for the tip on Comic Life. As you note, there seem to be some excellent applications for writing classes. I’m already mulling over an assignment that asks students to put together a comic strip representation of a traditional academic researched argument.

  3. I love the comic book. I’m not sure from your comments whether you actually got to show it at Cs, but I have heard some numbers for what the charges for projectors were, and they were OUTRAGEOUS! It seems ridiculous that Cs doesn’t include them, but at the prices, it’s understandable. Maybe a few rooms could have LCDs for presentations that really depend on projection. And they’d better make them big rooms because, in our visual culture, everyone will want to go.

  4. Hi Steven. I loved your talk and put a link and an image on my site. I could tell you some stories about tech people… I bet you get that all of the time! Again, you’ve done a great job.

    Ray

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