Sharing knowledge with others and explaining things to people (more or less familiar with a specific matter) is what I do on a regular basis. Not that I would make any money from it, well, not exactly. It is somehow in my very nature to try and help people that way, and I love it. Most of the time it makes me feel really good. (No, it is not an addiction. Not yet.) Especially when I get the impression that my efforts are appreciated and that I was able to actually help somebody, of course.
Some things are quite esay to explain, even on the phone, for example, where the spoken word is the one and only way to deal with things. But when a certain level of complexity and abstraction is reached, bounds of our language and imagnation are quite easily hit, and we simply fail to grasp it. As a matter of fact, this isn't an idividual problem. (Well, up to some level one might think it is, I agree.) The one and only thing we have to blame is our brain.
Ever since, humans have lived by the principle of trial and error, and have survived by finding and enhancing tools, hence the need to touch things (and other people), to learn about them. In addition to that, our brain is by far one of the most powerful image processing systems known to mankind so far. You doubt it? Try to make a computer recognise a handwritten text, or even a couple of letters that are twisted, or even just roteted. (That is one reason why some online services ask you to deal with CAPTCHAs, to post a comment on a blog or to subscribe to some newsletter, for example. I kid you not.)
Even though it might have unleashed the bounds of our imagination, the ability to talk, to communicate, has never changed our most basic, yet most powerful abilities to learn: the ability to make sense from images we see. We all know the proverb that a picture is worth a thousand words, and when it comes to explaining things and describing coherences, nothing compares to a picture or a sketch. It is all about visualisation, and the fact that is so much more easier for the human brain to memorise and process pictures (and sounds), than stuff that we would call "simple words".
Personally, I am an avid fan of whiteboards. And flip charts. But I prefer whiteboards: the bigger, the better. Like talking to yourself helps your brain to really understand your thoughts (compared to talking to yourself in your mind only), sketching out my ideas onto a whiteboard (or a sheets of paper) helps me to get the bigger picture, literally. When I am trying to figure out what makes things tick, how and why things work, or when I am trying to explain that to someone else, developing models or constructing theories - sketches, for me, are the way to do it.
So far, I have found that colleagues, apprentices and friends either like this approach, or they hate it. (Maybe it is not so much hate, but more about being scared.) Anyway, those who know me have become aware of the "risks" they are taking when asking me to explain something to them. Depending on the subject, it is a child's play for me to use up the whole space a whiteboard offers, once I have started sketching. That is why over the years, my moaning about my need for more whiteboards has become a running joke.
Apart from the fun everyone has when I start filling the whiteboards, flip charts or sheets of paper with all kinds of shapes, arrows and text, I really think that in many situations it is even a more sensible way to support a lecture or speech, compared to the omnipresent PowerPoint presentations. Please, don't get me wrong: a proper slide show can be a great way provide basic or additional informations, depending on subject and audience. It is the ongoing abuse of tools like PowerPoint or Keynote that saddens and irritates me. But that is a completely different story.
While using slide shows tends to turn speeches into quite static shows (and more often than not quite boring ones, too), spontaneously creating the images needed to help the audience to follow the presentation now, and remember what has been said later, is more active, sometimes even interactive. In addition to that, it is always a good way to show how flexible the speakers actually are, and if they really have a proper understanding of what they are talking about. (But maybe that is just me.)
So, if you would like to learn about things from my fields of expertise, feel free to ask, make sure you have enough time, and bring a whiteboard. I always need more whiteboards.
