They asked for this workshop, so they got it.
“They” are Adult and Community Education Victoria (ACEVic) and organization of community centers that offer adult education and training in communities around Victoria. My audience consisted of the CEOs of several centers.
And yes, they were interested in memes and GIFs.
The location was the Yarraville Community Center, My workshop today was at the Yarraville Community Center, housed in an old school building built in the mid 1800s, full of character. I arrived a bit early, and it was so rewarding to see all the adult students arriving for art, business, computer, language and other courses offered here.
My workshop started off with a spectacular fail of my missing VGA adapter, hustling a PC laptop set up, then finding my web pages would not load right in Internet Explorer, then some indecision until the Yarraville CEO in the room offered to install Firefox (thanks Chris!).
It’s rather helpful IMHO to demonstrate dealing with technology flubs, as long as you keep the banter going.
So we started with the conversation about what memes are, what they know of them, what is it about them that works. Then of course we made some. First with using the popular images available from the Imgflip Meme Generator then with images they have or can locate (preferrably a site of open licensed content, I recommend Pixabay for finding good metaphor images).
There was a round of having to figure things on the spot since the participants were using loaner iPads from the Community Center, which also means a bit of fumbling with the interface. We worked things out, they helped each other.
After a break, we move on to Grooving with GIFs, first talking about animated GIFs as useful for showing a process, or natural phenomena, or steps in a procedure that would be helpful for learners to watch repeatedly.
I have to share one that has made a great impression is on demonstrating the geometry of parallel parking:
They appreciated getting the info and idea of what GIFs might do, as well as all the activities and resources they could share with colleagues. It did not seem the best use of time to do them in detail, so we shifted the plan on the spot.
They wanted to know about my other workshops, so I talked about the one on What Works with Storytelling, and we ended up doing a round of pechaflickr… my memory is fuzzy on the tag we used. It does not matter. Every group I’ve done this for has expressed in interest in doing something with improv and communication.
I humbly appreciate the interest in talking about silly media with these adult educators, it’s not about the media themselves but ideas they might spin off. They were fully engaged the whole session, even facing their own afternoon meeting of likely more business matters,
Thanks to ACEVic for living in the moment for a few hours…
Featured Image: First Meme about Memes flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
