Back in January I gave a short presentation to some of my Jisc colleagues on maps and map making. The format of the event meant we could choose anything to talk about and I tried to not make it about storytelling, I really did but… well, you’ll see. Best laid plans and that.

You can have a good laugh at me struggling to work out how to get the Mac to play video about halfway through.

The headlines

• I’m a big fan of maps because I did geography at university. Or maybe I did geography because I’m a big fan of maps. Who knows?
• For me, maps are as important for understanding the world as stories are. If Stories make sense of experiences, maps make sense of places.
• We’re mentally making maps all the time, even when we’re lost. That’s part of the fun of being lost.
• Showing things spatially, particularly data, allows a deeper understanding of something and can help make data easier to relate to.

But my conclusion went a bit meta. Maps are still important to me, not just because of their usefulness and appearance, but because they’re a thread that connects me to m time studying at university. That was where I started my life as a learning professional and forms a big part of my identity.

And having a strong sense of identity and purpose is important when going through periods of change and upheaval as we’ve been experiencing in Jisc for the last year or thereabouts.

So, I could have said all that in 30 seconds rather then 10 mins. Never mind. It was a good exercise in planning and delivering a tight presentation and I learnt a lot from watching my colleagues deliver theirs. It’s one of the best aspects of working at Jisc, that we get these opportunities to be a bit more creative and spend time learning for the sake of it.