Yesterday, I wrote a long, rambling entry about a piece of software called Lyx. In the midst of all of that, I noted that Power Point users tend to focus on how the information is presented rather than the information itself. This whole concept of style over substance deserves a bit more time.

I can't believe I'm about to use this phrase. At 32, I'm old enough to remember presentations from before the era of Power Point. Presentations were done with the use of a blackboard of some kind or with overhead film. Usually the presenter either wrote on the overhead or he typed up his slides ahead of time.

Dynamic transitions did not exist. To cover only a bit of the slide at a time, the presenter would slowly slide a piece of paper down the slide. Occasionally, as a nod to artistic creativity, the presenter would intersperse a slide of a cartoon or a diagram.

The change to presentation software changed all of that. Suddenly, there were an infinite number of colors and backgrounds to choose from, a limitless number of fonts, and all sorts of fabulous animations and sounds.

Suddenly, bulleted items would twirl into view, or the slide would switch by bouncing off the screen. This would be accompanied by computerized sounds of "boing" or typewriter sounds or anything else that can be imagined. Presenters experimented with color combinations, many with insufficient contrast.

This created several problems. One was that the presenter spent a lot more time on playing with the options of the presentation than he did with the actual content. This is easily witnessed when by asking students to present information to the class. A simple presentation can easily turn into a long ordeal as students play with all the possible fonts and colors rather than the information.

At the same time, due to the constraints of the screen, presenters had trouble organizing information into a clear storyline. An outline tends to follow a storyline. The slides of presentation software make it easy to break the information into discrete, unrelated chunks.

Even papers must have lists of specific requirements. Students will experiment with every conceivable font (sometimes all on one page). They'll alter color, centering, and font size. They'll embed pointless clip art and strange pictures. A teacher must now require specific fonts and font sizes. Back in the days of typewriters, teachers only had to mandate line spacing and margin size.

There are benefits to this as well as drawbacks. The artistic freedom is great for those who have the talent to use it. For most of us, however, it is actually a detriment. It gives us the license to do what we want, but takes our focus away from what matters: content. In fact, for many of us, our attempts at art actually distract from the content. The essence of good design is that you don't notice it. Consider the brilliance of a regular #2 pencil. We never think of its design because it is so functional. Similarly, a well designed kitchen allows the cook to work efficiently so that she may not even notice how it is layed out. Marble counters, baskets of dried flowers, and pretty bottles of oil may catch the eye, but if they reduce the cook's efficiency, they are BAD design.

Yesterday, I noted that I'm using Lyx for many of my documents now. At first it was constricting. In my labs, I like to have reminders and leading questions bulleted and colored green for emphasis. Lyx lets me bullet or not bullet. To change color, I will have to really delve into technical details. Similarly, I'm fond of the Goudy Old Style font. Lyx gives me no choice of font. I'm actually not sure what font it does use. It's similar to Times New Roman but with subtle differences.

However, while I've lost some control, I've gained a lot in terms of expressing my content. Pictures don't wander around the page as I change what I say. They stay where they are put. Instead of worrying about whether or not to put a dividing line between sections and, perhaps, color coding it for labs and readings, Lyx "decided" not to put one there. Lyx has a different numbering scheme than what I use, but it turns out to be quite workable.

The point is that because I can't currently work on design, I spend more time on content. As someone who has chased diagrams all over pages to get them to go where I want, I'm quite grateful for a program that is always predictable.

Frankly, I have been guilty of both extremes of design. I have been over designed. I have also been quite minimalist (my current trend). I had a good template for my labs and readings. However, my in-class presentations were minimal: white background, black text, and no transitions or emphasis. Lyx takes care of all of this and now I'm thinking a lot more about content.

Design is fun, especially when you're not trying to use good design. Playing with fonts and colors is fun. Experimenting with sound effects and cool transitions is fun. Expressing content and editing for clarity, brevity, and grammar are not fun. That is why presentations have such great style. Too many presenters spend time with appearance, not content.

People tend to respond to style more than content as well. Imagine a candidate who is obese, speaks in a monotone, and has difficulty making eye contact. Put him against a slender, athletic man who speaks well, makes eye contact, and has a winning smile. The latter will get a much more positive response, even if the former is the better candidate. The best candidate will, of course, have the entire package, but we are too easily influenced by style.

I get these feelings each time our current president opens his mouth. I actually agree with him on many issues, but I find his manner of speaking and his nervous giggle extremely grating.

The same is true with issues of any type. Imagine a debate in which an attractive, confident, well-dressed, non-sleazy woman speaks in favor of sexual freedom. Her opponent is either elderly or frumpy, not so well-dressed, and perhaps a bit nervous. She speaks in favor of abstinence. Those who watch the debate identify themselves not just with the issues. They identify themselves with the speaker. Emotionally, we'd rather not associate ourselves with the frump.

I will confess that I notice attractive women. A good-looking woman will get my attention much more quickly than the dowdy or plain woman. I know that it is what is inside that counts, and I will notice it, but I won't notice it right away.  Fortunately, God blessed me with some shyness around women. Since I'm incapable of approaching and immediately "hooking up with" women, I tend to get involved with women only after I've gotten to know the inside and built up the nerve to get involved.

Clearly, then, the style over substance issue is not just in academic settings. It applies to candidates for office (or job), dates, and even political or societal issues. It takes a real effort of will to look beyond the style to the content underneath.

Where does the time go? It seems that for about a month, by the time I get schoolwork done, bed sounds a lot more inviting than writing a blog or taking care of any of my other interests. I haven't posted pictures to my Flickr account, have about 5 weeks of unread magazines piled up, haven't done any fiction writing, and even my Netflix videos are sitting unwatched.

Actually, this last isn't true. While catching up on cleaning and other things yesterday, my DVD player ran all day! I've finally seen my movies.

I'd still like to talk about my NCATE meeting, but not today. Instead, today, I'd like to talk about some software I discovered.

Lyx
The greatest discovery I made over this time was Lyx. I'm reorganizing my labs and handouts into more of a book form and I was dissatisfied with OpenOffice. It was adequate, and I love the formula editor, but the output on the page wasn't quite right. In some undefinable way, there was something missing. It was a step above Word (for my purposes), especially with the formula editor, but the output on the printed page just lacked something.

Anyway, I stumbled by accident across a program called Lyx. Lyx is a graphical interface for the Latex typesetting engine. Latex, in turn, is a friendly mark-up language for Tex. These last two sentences are bad teaching practice, so allow me to define these terms:

• Typesetting engine - This is software that arranges words on the page so that they look good. Compare a good quality book to the output from your word processor and you will see the difference.
• Graphical Interface - You are probably using a graphical interface now. This is where you use a mouse and press pictures on the screen rather than recall arcane commands.
• Mark-up - This is a programming language used for text. HTML is an example. Rather than highlight text and press the bold button, you might instead use a command such as <bold>text</bold>. The mark-up is still there behind the scenes. Knowing a little about the mark-up language helps someone fine-tune the presentation of his text.
• Latex - This is a mark-up language that allows the user to typeset documents in a fairly familiar language. Its greatest strength is its presentation of mathematical formulas. They look incredible on the page. Word and OpenOffice are unable to match the look.
• Tex - This is a scary programming language that controls how text is placed on the page. Few people work with Tex. They use either Latex or Lyx, both of which have Tex at their core. Tex does an excellent job with hyphenation, letter spacing, image placement, and many other features. It is a typesetting engine.
• 
  

With Lyx, I've found quite a nice piece of software. It is not for beginners or casual users. It requires a steep learning curve, especially to accomplish the more exotic goals. However, the results are lovely and consistent. Most word processors borrow features from it, though few people use them.

The main feature is called "Styles" in most programs. Rather than boldface text or change its font or centering, we classify text by its style. I might decide that chapter titles should all be bold-faced, 17 point font, and centered. Most  word-processor users make this adjustment manually each time. Efficient users will set up a paragraph style called "Chapter Title" with all this formatting in it. Then, each time, they simply tell the program that something is a paragraph title. The computer formats it. I've been doing this for years.  The great benefit is in making changes. If I decide I want all my chapter titles to be pink, I simply change the style and the program changes it everywhere. Without styles, I would have to make this change manually on each instance of a chapter title.

Lyx makes it rather difficult to set up specific changes to its styles. Changing styles requires an understanding of the underlying Latex language. However, the styles it has do look good. By sacrificing a little artistic freedom, I get good results and concentrate on the words rather than their presentation. In reality, my readers (students) should be focusing on the information, not my artistry. If they don't even notice my page-layout, that is perhaps the best compliment of all.

This last comment brings me to another feature of Lyx. I have been subjected to many power point presentations which are filled with animations, sounds, and other special effects. The first time you turn students loose with power point to present information, they will spend all their time on the presentation and not on the information in that presentation. This is true even in too many professional presentations. This is exactly backward. The information is most important. The presentation should be so good and so natural that you don't even notice it.

I used to be guilty of this. My old presentations are filled with formulas doing flips as they zip onto the screen and 6-spoke transitions that take forever. I then went through a spell of no animations and using simple black text on a white background. This became more important as I made presentations available to students on the Internet.

Now I'm using Lyx to make my presentations. First, I lay out the content as an outline. I don't worry about anything except content as I write the outline. I simply lay it out as clearly as I can. This I convert to a .pdf and put on the internet. Nearly all students can open a .pdf file. Many fewer can open a power point file.

Then, I go back through and arrange the information into slides. I'm still a little slow with this as Lyx doesn't allow me to easily preview the slides. I also add any special effects such as making lines appear one by one. Then I toss a template of styles on it and I've created a gorgeous presentation to use in class. I would prefer to have a green bar rather than a blue bar at the top of the screen, but by sacrificing this freedom, I have been allowed to focus on what matters. Really, I can learn the underlying Latex code and change the style.

Best of all, this is a portable presentation. Lyx exports it to a .pdf and it looks the same no matter what computer it is on. Also, most computers can run it. For someone like me who runs Linux, Apple, and Windows on a daily basis, this portability is vital! I don't have the distracting special effects or sounds, so students quickly forget the presentation and focus on the content. Isn't that the essence of good design?

Inkscape

My discovery of Inkscape is quite recent. It is a graphics program, but based around a different philosophy than MS-Paint or the GIMP. These programs view a picture as a bunch of lightbulbs. Each lightbulb can be turned on or off and its color may be changed. When we look more closely at the picture, we see the lightbulbs growing larger and larger. Zoom in on any picture from the Internet and you will see this.

This is a great philosophy for many purposes. When I work with digital pictures, this makes sense. For many artistic applications, it is good. However, for certain types of picture or diagram, it doesn't work. If I am trying to put a graph or a picture into my handouts that I've created with Lyx, I want them to look good no matter what size they are.

Inkscape views pictures as a series of vectors. Rather than say "light up 4 bulbs in a row here," Inkscape says "Make a line here that is this percent of the image width." Thus, when the screen is enlarged, it still looks good. Most word processors, including Word and OpenOffice, follow this philosophy when you use the drawing utility embedded in them.

I recently made a diagram of projectile motion. I had to scale it back to about 10% of its original size. It still looks good. The letters are sharp and crisp, and there is no loss of information. Just for fun, I expanded it to 3 times its size. Again, it was just fine.

Conclusion

There are many types of software out there. Some, such as OpenOffice and Word attempt to be all things to all people. For the general user they are sufficient. However, there are some much more specialized alternatives out there. Because they specialize, they don't do everything, but they excel at what they do. The examples I have given here are Open Source programs. There are also programs out there used by professionals that cost money. I've never used them, so I can't compare.

The other important theme that came up today was the importance of focusing on content, not presentation. This is an issue, not just in writing, but in our society. Take a good look at our field of presidential candidates. Look not at their presentation. Look at their content. I'm not going to get political right now, but in both parties we have candidates who have great presentation, but there is nothing behind the facade.

I've been gone for about a week attending some training in the eastern end of the state. I'm finally back!

I'll post this coming week about what I learned. For now, I'll just say that it was very interesting. I saw a lot of good and some that was disturbing.

The training I attended was for NCATE, an organization that evaluates teacher candidate programs in universities. Some of the good was that it gives an outside evaluation to a program. It also forces the university to look seriously at what it is doing and decide if it is worthwhile or not. It also asks the university to look at its field experiences and qualifications of its faculty.

The bad is that there is a political bent to this, and perhaps that is unavoidable. The trouble comes in diversity. Admittedly, teacher candidates need experience outside their comfort zone. We don't all teach white, middle-class, conservative Christian students. The opportunity to experience this other side of America is important. At the same time, NCATE also looks at the diversity of the faculty and teacher candidates. They claim that this is not affirmative action, but it certainly seems to be teetering on the brink.

I'll look at all of this during the coming week.