I made a sort of zine-ish thing that are some draft thoughts on Empathy as an ideology. You can read it online here or download it with the link below to print out yourself. If you print it, it needs to be double sided, flip on the short edge, for every page after the first page (the first page is the cover and should be printed alone). With the double sided print you get a short little booklet one you fold the cover and interior pages in half. Details on making your own zine-ish thing and how it can help support course material can be found at the end of the post.

How To Make Something Like This

I’ve been exploring the flexibility of Google Slides recently. I’ve created a couple of infographics for work that I can’t publicly share, helped a few people design syllabi, etc etc. So when I decided I wanted to play around with the visual language of a zine using digital tools, I knew there HAD to be something out there. I found it at STL’s Zine Library – Resources & Support. There is a link to a Google Slides Template that you just copy to your google slides and then you are ready to go.

In order to do this digitally but still get the look and feel I was going for I used a combination of royalty free photographs and clip art that I edited in Photoshop, the Paper App for iPad to create the illustrations and some of the text. As I knew what I wanted to do and had a sense of the copy I was able to get this done over a weekend.

I do projects like this to help me untangle my thoughts, and I think in certain courses working with different formats is good for students too. If you are a google slides campus (my current institution is), it is an easy way to take advantage of the affordance of the platform. And if students don’t have and iPad and apple pencil, all of this can be done on paper, photographed with cell phones, and then added to the slide deck. If it is done in a course this would be a candidate for a collaborative project/concept study guide where groups put together a very short digital “zine” on an assigned concept that can then be shared with the whole course.