The first is to listen to what others are asking to find topics. Often I have simple short answers and direct references with easy links. When there are deeper and more interesting ideas unexpressed, I gather together the knowledge and wisdom and ideas needed to answer the questions fully. Then everything gets bound into a single document with little organization, just an olio of ideas. Often things stay in this way for a long, long time until a delivery time and date is chosen.
The first draft can be very very long and repetitive, but it's taking my scroll of notes, copying it, and thinking about an organizational pattern that is suitable to the material. Then it's shuffle the information around into an order that might work as a lecture or essay.
After that at-least-third draft by now, the chore is to consider exactly who and when the information is to be delivered and what illustrations and examples to include for those who might have interest and tailoring the material for them, looking for references and citing what I find. Now it is close to a final form, and it's copy it all again, and go thru for grammar, spelling , brevity, consistency and all those other things scholars honor.
Now, often the same material might work for two mediums, say a lecture in Second Life and a ethereal scroll(-ing webpage) online. Then it's construct each format for its medium. In Second Life, in example, I can use objects in illustration, but not in a scroll(-ing webpage). Conversely, I can use images freely in scrolls, but not so easily in SL.
When making both a lecture and a scroll, I will prepare for a lecture by constructing a draft but not publishing the online page. Then, at lecture time, I copy and paste from my scroll draft copiously. During the lecture, I often receive insight and questions from the attendees that crystallize important points, or tell me what points need exposition, clarification or example. I quickly provides those on the fly during the lecture slot if I can. Then, after the lecture, those additions and amendments get edited into the scroll draft, and finally, the scroll can be released. This page is an example of such a scroll:
http://aulethesmith.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-history-of-elvish-weaponry-part-1.html
I could make illustrated classroom books like this one about Sheriwood in Second Life with book writers, but I dislike that medium due to the handling of images and loss of copyable text. To compress data and image for a "page" degrades both the image and the text some, making the text non-copyable into other media (a good idea sometimes, but not always) and the information available only in this very specific context:
- computer on, in SL viewer,
- logged into that account,
- object rezzed,
- camera oriented, and
- little distraction
- computer on
- browser open,
- web page loaded
Often, when I find such things as images or note cards in SL, I will, with the author's permission only, mirror the book to a blog post like this:
http://aulethesmith.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-create-rp.html
