How to teach technical concepts with cartoons

It’s called “Bookmarks”, and is a feature present in all web browsers since time immemorial. :-)

And yes, I happen to be interested in good visual explanations of techical issues, so when I see one I bookmark it, so I can find it when I want to use it to explain something.

Chrysler did a similar thing many decades ago for its training: http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Films/index47.htm

I think to be effective in using cartoons for teaching, you have to make them entertaining and integrated, but also not be completely flippant --- and that depends on the reader, which is why it's not for everyone.

I worked with an analyst a few years ago. I'll call her Alice. Alice wasn't very good at her job. She was ok and could get stuff done with sufficient hand-holding. The problem was she was really insecure.

Alice worried that she wasn't smart enough or experienced enough in this particular industry to do her job. She was. But she had the air of someone who was always worried about being found out. So instead of talking with the managers or users that she should have been talking to to get her work done, she would go to people she trusted, like me, who liked to be helpful when they could and who, as a developer or someone who had been with the company a while, might know a little something of how what she was asking about worked, but probably shouldn't have been the person she was talking to. This annoyed a lot of people.

What she was really good at was decorating her cubicle. She was a genius at it. She would do it for every major holiday and even some of the minor ones.

Alice's boss liked to gripe about her to me. She hadn't hired Alice, didn't really like her, and didn't offer her much support.

We had a lot of arcane business processes. I thought it would be nice if we could throw some light on these, maybe come up with some charts or creative visualizations that could serve as a general reference. Cartoons like this would have have been great.

One year, around Halloween, when the company sponsored a cubicle-decorating contest with prizes, Alice's boss was complaining to me about how much effort Alice had put into decorating her cubicle. It was impressive. She had turned it into a little haunted house.

I suggested to Alice's boss maybe trying to leverage Alice's cubicle-decorating skills to visualize some of these business processes and workflows.

A few weeks later Alice was laid off.

I credit 'A FORTRAN Coloring Book' with saving my first computing class, long, long ago. I bought it as a supplement to the textbook and lectures, as the lightbulb wasn't quite coming on for me through those. Among other things, the book taught me that getting a second perspective could sometimes be just what you need. I wound up acing the class... and finding a career. My copy sits in a place of honor on my bookshelf.