I came across this blog post - https://outputerror.com/posts/prepping-courses-with-org-mode/ - in Sacha Chua’s 14 September 2026 emacs news and I found it quite interesting.

The author, Rick Wysocki, talks about the idea of component content modularity from technical writing. I had not come across this term before. It applies the software engineering principles of reuse and DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) to writing. The idea being that if your writing is in small, modular reusable components it is easy to pull together different combinations of the content for different purposes (e.g. a first lesson on a topic as well as an end of semester summary lesson). It also means that you can update content in the original component source, and that flows through to all of the places that it is used.

I use PowerPoint a lot in my work. It has, for various reasons, the default tool for document creation in the work that I do. I hate the incredibly manual “busywork” of arranging content on the slides and getting the format consistent. Computers are meant to be these wonderful devices that can do the boring repetitive stuff for us, but here we are using them as glorified digital versions of manual writing and layout tools. I love the idea of LaTeX, Org and similar systems where you write the content and let the computer transform it into a pretty format.

What I have grudgingly learnt to accept, is that one of the strengths of PowerPoint as a document creation tool is that slides are modular content. A well constructed slide conveys a single idea and should be able to stand on its own. These slides can be reused multiple times in different documents - status updates, initial insight presentations, final reports, and more.

I also like the idea that Rick puts out of managing your content in your own system (Org in his case) and copying into the learning management system (LMS, a new terminology that I learnt). This feels very similar to the POSSE approach of IndieWeb.