The SPLOT? Billboards for the Mystery of the Internet at #PressEdConf18

It’s one of those things to keep your attention on long drives. From hundreds of miles away are billboards enticing you to check out The Thing in southern Arizona. From a piece in Vice:

The Thing is advertised on billboards stretching hundreds of miles, from Arizona to Texas, but it’s impossible to understand The Thing until you’re staring right at it.

That somehow entered my brain as a metaphor for my 15 minute twitter talk today at the Press Ed Conference, What the SPLOT is That?.

That’s right, today I attended a fantastic conference about the use of WordPress in Education, all from my chair at home. No plane travel, no cline motel, no buffet lunch, no name tag glancing, no shelling out hundred dollar registrations, no vendor hall, no confined to rows under fluorescent lights listening to someone tell me what’s on their slides.

It was not only a refreshing change of format, in one day there were 45 sessions many from people I’ve not heard from before. The format was one that you could soak in live, or go through at your own pace. In the constraint of 10-20 tweets, you had to leave out the fluff, and also a lot of detail, and more or less get people’s interested in coming back for me.

A huge thanks to Natalie Lafferty and Pat Lockley for pulling off (what must have been an exhausting day) maybe the most energetic anti-conference gathering in a while.

Okay, back to the SPLOTs. Once I did that first graphic, I found myself down the Photoshop hole of remixing more billboards. Here are my tweeted anti-slides:

What the SPLOT is THAT?

Another aspect of this is that the preparation was hardly intense (unless one is dumb enough to take on doing 10 photoshop re-edits). It’s a matter of writing ~10 tweets, adding links, maybe images, and thinking about expressing a project in a minimal amount of words. The biggest hangup might have been scheduling the tweets (I kept making mistakes, and found out if there in an image in a Scheduled Tweet you cannot edit it, you must delete and re-compose).

And about that SPLOT Thing?