What I did this week
I attended a meeting of the internal community of practice of the Open University’s content design team. We had fun and a good conversation about bilingual design and collaboration and I showed them some of my slides before the end (I needed to, after I had planned them so carefully!). I was very grateful to be invited.
I also published some bilingual design resources to give to the team at the Open University. I did this on GitHub. I’ve been exploring this as a way of working openly (publishing it, not just talking about it here). It’s fairly simple to do this and is a way of testing ideas to create more formal resources that we can publish on the CDPS website, for example.
I published an article about AI, translation and the Welsh language . Again, with the intention of sharing ideas that would otherwise be in an internal folder and only shared with certain people. I get paid publicly, so why not share it publicly. I would like the ideas to stimulate others as well, whether they disagree or agree. This is mostly thinking out loud at the moment.
Highlights
In the Content Design Cymru community of practice, Russell Davies came to talk to us about the art of presentation. I loved it. He said something inspiring:
– “Writing is thinking, presenting is deciding”
This is often what writing like this is – reflecting and thinking. The idea of “deciding” in the form of a presentation is striking. In a business context, someone presents to give an opinion, persuade or influence. Similarly, performing live is a matter of persuasion and giving an opinion in the form of what you have already reflected on previously. Whatever you’re doing, on stage, you need to convince an audience.
I also went to meet Jo, Josh and Fernando to look at the manuscript of the accessibility book. The design looks great. I am keen to have a final reading now so that it can go to press.