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Civil Air Patrol

Cadet News & Innovations

 

We're ready to see many of you at the National Boards in San Antonio over Labor Day weekend. Perhaps the most important seminar we'll be hosting is "Cadet News & Innovations," which summarizes what's recently been released in Cadet Programs, what's upcoming, and what new ideas are on the table for discussion. We're making our handout available to Cadet Blog readers. Download it at right. 

If you've read our white papers or attended our seminars, you've probably noticed that we take an unorthodox approach to PowerPoint. That medium is inherently low-resolution, usually consisting of (a) grunt-like phrases organized around bullets or (b) an illegible wall of text that the speaker proceeds to read to you. Even worse, slides aren't easily portable. For example, many CAP members attend conferences to "represent" their home unit. These folks want to take back news to their fellow members who couldn't attend. With slides, that task is nearly impossible. Even if you obtain hard copies of the slides, who can figure out what the speaker actually said, just by looking at the slides?

Our approach (informed by Edward Tufte, tufte.com) is to use high-resolution paper handouts built around good old fashioned prose. Our hope is that handouts like what we're using for the "Cadet News & Innovations" seminar will be a better way to communicate, especially for those of you unable to say Howdy to us in San Antonio.

What do you think?

 

Comments

I attended the National Conference and was glad to see that both the classes and assemblies had paper copies. Though PowerPoints are nice sometimes, paper copies are much easier for read and easier to distribute.

I love the idea of posting polls here! Is there a way for other members to insert this poll into their blogs to feed it more results?

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Poll
Do you like detailed, paper-based handouts for seminars?
Yes. More information is better. Good handouts are easy to share with friends, too.
No. We live in a PowerPoint world and should use slides to communicate whenever possible.
I'm not sure.

 

 
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