Explaining technology in words
February 28, 2008 – 1:54 pmJulie Starr faced an interesting problem recently: how to explain RSS, aggregators, even Twitter to a room full of journalism students ... without slides or a net connection. In attempting this, as she says, she "found a new respect for teachers this week". As a recovering teacher (or, as we're called when companies pay the bill and we have no pedagogic qualifications, trainer) I thought I'd give it a go. The basic rule is that you start with what they already know and move out from there. So rather than starting with Twitter, I'd start with newspaper web sites ... You know how at the heart of a newspaper's web site is a continuously-growing pile of stories, but there's a lot of web site froufrou on top of it? I'm talking about how stories are separated into pages and pumped with ads and links to other parts ...