I am taking another course. I have ben taking courses, webinars and stuff forever. Hell, I even literally went back to school last summer. But I have never really talked about it, except for last summer. I'm changing that. I will be talking about the classes I'm taking. Why not? I talk about the classes I'm giving, no?

Anyhoo.

I am currently registered to the Verbal to Visual Classroom, an online course by Doug Neill, of verbaltovisual.com. The course started last week with the Introduction modules and Doug should put up this week's modules any moment now. I am enjoying it.

I do not expect to learn a lot from the course about visual note taking and sketchnoting per se. I have been doing this for a while now. I do think what I will learn are tricks and structures to make my sketchnotes more legible, clearer, have better layout. I don't need help planning sketchnotes, but I do need pointers as to how to take better live sketchnotes. Those are hard for me. I am horrible with layout on the fly. I need tricks I can depend on to achieve better layout on the fly.

The other thing I hope to get from this course are techniques and workflows to make doing these visual notes more quickly, especially in the university context. I have started using visual notes as class notes for my students since last year. I have used them as discussion starters in seminars, as slides in presentations and such. However, my default mode is words. It makes writing visual notes a more difficult process than it should be. My visual class notes are good, but they could be better and they take so much time!

In the end I have two objectives for this course, depending if I'm taking live notes or class notes. And the problems are distinct, even if they stem from the same fact. I'm a words woman.

Evidently! This is a blog for goodness sake! I do words well! Easily! This is not a vlog, nor a Tumblr. I do words or I do images. It's the in between, the both together that's hard for me. I've tried to start visual journaling several times in the past, to no avail. Really, those were bad.

I'm taking this course in hope that something will click in this weird brain of mine and find a way to fuse both image and text. In the end, that is really the hard part for me. It doesn't really matter that my lines are crooked or that my writing swerves all over the place. It's that my drawing brain and my writing brain seem to be on different planes. I need to merge them. Somehow.

On and forward.