Poster Blitz

Last week I found out that I would be traveling to Florida at the end of the month for a conference. I also was informed that in addition to my attendance to the confenrence/workshop, I would have to present a poster. Nominally, construction of a poster takes about a day or two, so initially I wasn’t too worried. However, I soon found out that rather than a purely technical poster, the information would need to tend towards generality. The primary audience of the conference will be industry and political, so I had to take existing presentations and translate them into “simple English” (check Wikipedia translation choice – simple English!)

Of course the whole reason that I’m writing this post is to elucidate the point that explanation to laymen is deceivingly difficult. With the knowledge I have, it takes arduous effort to retrace my learning steps from the inception of the subject. And to make matters more difficult, not everyone learns with the same style or at the same rate. Since nearly every major university has a department of education where people learn to teach effectively, overcoming the curse of knowledge is anything but trivial.

Essentially my method for explanation of tedious topics of estimations and power systems was to illustrate them graphically if possible. I’ve also minimized text, though honestly I could remove more, and I incorporated many arrows to aid with concept flow. I’ve got some colleagues aiding the inspection of the poster, so hopefully the gist of my research comes across clearly!