COETAIL Course 3, Reflection 6

I found the Kevin Kelly post about screen literacy fascinating and little optimistic.

With full-blown visuality, I should be able to annotate any object, frame or scene in a motion picture with any other object, frame or motion-picture clip. I should be able to search the visual index of a film, or peruse a visual table of contents, or scan a visual abstract of its full length. But how do you do all these things? How can we browse a film the way we browse a book?

While I have no doubt that many minds much smarter than my own are hard at work trying to make this possible, I think it is a very sticky computational problem. The sheer mass of video that is being produced is staggering. The power necessary to sift through all those images and videos will be enormous. I wonder when the web will overtake transportation in terms of energy consumption? Has it already?

While I am not holding my breath, I certainly would love to have access to the web this way. This way I wouldn’t get images of this…

confused with images of this:

COETAIL Course 3, Reflection: Final Project

Here is my final project, a screencast explaining some ways to think about formatting a document using styles.

The goal of this project for me was to produce a stand-alone presentation that could be used by HS English teachers to give guidance on efficient formatting functions, particularly in MS Word. Firstly I checked in with the department head to identify a unit during which they might want to use such a presentation. After identifying research papers as a good candidate I obtained the formatting sample that the students receive. I used it to identify a subset of commonly overlooked, but useful functionality available in MS Word and other word processing and layout applications. I chose screencasting as the delivery mechanism.

I did a bit of experimentation with screencasting software to get comfortable with it. As I planned my screencast I tried to think of the audience. In my experience it can be difficult to persuade people to do things differently in familiar programs. I identified fear of an unproductive learning curve, as in spending 15 min learning something that only saves 5 minutes work, as the main obstacle.

Initially I approached it almost like an infomercial, trying to be convincing. I also spent way too long rehearsing and fighting with Word trying to get it to behave consistently. The screencast was becoming very long, detailed and boring.

I reread presenting naked for some inspiration and completely revamped the majority of the video. Making the lessons more general and being honest about the difficulties involved really helped my message.

I am looking forward to feedback from the English department.

COETAIL Course 3, Reflection 5

Presenting Naked

Garr Reynolds is spot on with is post about Presenting Naked. He described a quality which good presenters and good presentations have that I have enjoyed but never really thought about consciously before. For me it all boils down to comfortability with the audience. Obviously, it is no good if you are visibly uncomfortable with your audience, but there are different ways to be comfortable. Being ‘distant’ & ‘professional’ with your audience is one way to be comfortable, but it is not as likely to let you make a lasting impression on your audience. The most effective way is to speak to them is politely, but frankly, as you would speak to a friend while acquaintances and strangers are also listening.

I expect the ability of this method of presenting deliver the presenters message effectively is related to our gut reactions to trust. It is frequently pointed out that we value the opinions of our friend’s over the opinions of experts who are unfamiliar to us.

After reading presenting naked, I was reminded of a recent TED talk by Beau Lotto that exemplified this presenting naked perfectly. If you have an interest in perception and what research about perception shows about the way we build our conception of the world, it is a great talk and not at all off topic for a visual literacy course.

COETAIL Course 3, Reflection 4

Digital Storytelling

Firstly, here is the video.

It was my idea to grab audio from a recent interview I had heard to form the basis for our digital story-telling project. The audio is from a DemocracyNow interview conducted by Amy Goodman of master story-teller, folk-singer and activist Utah Phillips. Great, so we had a good solid story, saving us lots of work right?

Well the next step was quite time consuming, gathering the related images. Each team member took a separate concept or segment and began Googling for images. I would like to say that we omitted the whole Creative Commons and giving credit routine because we ran out of time, but it was a consensus right from the beginning that we were skipping that. Theoretically, we know how to do that already, so that is an academic point.

Next we got to the bottleneck. Our resident iMovie expert, Patience, brought all the stills into iMovieHD (the old iMovie) and began adjusting the length of the stills to match the audio. There was no way we could figure to really break this step down into something we could all contribute to. The sound is about 3 and a half minutes and we made it about 3/4 of the way through.

The project was then redone from the stills with a few new images added. I forced myself to use the newer iMovie09. For this kind of thing the 'precision editor' is awesome and, oddly enough, so is the audio scrubbing. Audio scrubbing is on by default and it is one of the first things you want to learn how to turn of when you make the transition from HD to 09.

Two things really stood out to me about this experience. It takes longer than I thought it would. I wonder if I will get used to it or if it is subject to Hoffstader's Law, which states:

It always takes longer than you think it will, even when you take Hoffstader's Law into account.

Seriously though, the time it takes is worth it because the sum is greater than the parts. The story is more compelling when told in this way and it is enormously satisfying to finish one off. I am glad I redid the project.

COETAIL Course 3, Reflection 3

Transferable Skills

Last Saturday’s discussion really got me thinking.
Sometimes it is very hard to articulate wisdom or principles gained by experience rather than instruction. Successful habits become “second-nature” or “unconscious”. When you are taught explicitly you have the memory of the lesson and you often have been encouraged to reflect on your experience of learning. Both of these provide easier access to ways you can describe a particular skill you have acquired to someone else down the road, but more importantly for this post I am skeptical about the notion that these transferable skills can be disseminated. I think they have to be ingrained through experience and practice. I think the transferability really comes in to play as a result of acquiring mastery.

“from one thing, know ten thousand things” — Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

How is this possible? Very general principles apply across disparate domains. For more specific principals there has to be some kind of conceptual mapping between the two domains. The Book of Five Rings was written by a master swordsman* and it is full of wisdom about prevailing in a conflict. The book became a popular read for businesspeople because there is, arguably, some congruity between the two domains of conflict and competition. Notice that the person seeking wisdom from this book must have great familiarity with their domain to know how to apply the principles.
What I fear we are asking our students to do in teaching information literacy in the structure I presently understand to be is analogous to the following.
Teaching a bit of violin, a bit of piano and a bit of drums at different times, in different places, just-in-time for performing specific songs. The songs themselves have been chosen primarily to teach or reinforce other core content. From my own personal experience, I was forced to learn one program inside and out as part of a job**. Subsequently I find it to be interesting, fun and often easy to pick up new programs. I don’t know if this analogy holds and water. More importantly I doubt it even matters because it is not fluency or expertise here that is our goal, it is more an attitude we are trying to foster. (Mindset vs Skill-set distinction)
All right, enough naysaying, here is my list of little tech attitudes/skills that I have acquired over the years. May they be at least of interest to you, if not benefit. :)

Attitudes & Distinctions

Appearances Are Only Part of the Story

I already mentioned one area where this is true: pasting from MS Word into a Web App. There are these things called character encodings and it is beyond the scope of this post to explain them. Suffice to say, I had some jobs with deadlines that forced me to learn about them and the behavior of text across various applications is a lot less mysterious to me now. Another quick anecdote on this, I was forwarded an email the other day and asked for my opinion about the layout of the email. The original email was one of those fancy ones, like a newsletter with lots of html and images and formatted text, but that did not show up in the forwarded email. So I took a screen capture and sent it back asking if was supposed to look that way. The recipient insisted I did not send an attachment at first, then later tried to select text appearing in the image. Opps, this doesn’t sound like it is of any use.

Interface Conventions

There are certain things that are similar across many different programs, particularly on the Mac since Apple publishes guidelines for interfaces. Quoting from the intro to them on the Apple website:

Users will learn your application faster if the interface looks and behaves like applications they’re already familiar with.
Users can accomplish their tasks quickly, because well-designed applications don’t get in the user’s way.

The second one there is a double edged sword, it says much of the less frequently used functionality is going to be hidden. If you can begin to master the intricacies of one program you will begin to notice that the extent to which functionality is hidden and the hiding places are common to many programs. This is particularly true of programs that share some kind of kinship like all being word-processors or all being made by the same company.

Webapp vs Desktop App: NOT the Same

I do a bit of one-on-one training for adults who are new to computing. I also have small children, Pre-K and 3rd grade. One thing they have in common is they don’t make a clear distinction between Webapps and Desktop apps. Occasionally this can lead to problems so it can be good to get clear on the difference. The biggest offender here is web-based email because if that is primarily what you use the computer for, and you have always used a service like YaHoo for your email it can be confusing. To make the distinction clear, Yahoo is a webapp which you use in a web-browser, such as Firefox, Safari or InternetExplorer— all of which are desktop applications. The difference is a web app can be used in different browsers, with varying degrees of success, and it relies on an internet connection. The code of which the app is made resides on the server, somewhere on the web. In contrast a desktop application runs from a users computer and does so regardless of whether there is an internet connection.
An important consequence of these differences is that the costs of operation are different. If you are ever trying to get an intuition about whether it is possible to do something with a particular webapp it is good to know how its creators make money. For example, powerful programs that doesn’t cost the user any money directly is often crippled in some way and hoping to entice payment for a fully functional version.

Little Things Matter

Designers try to put a lot of functionality into software interfaces. There are sometimes subtle distinctions between where you click. For example in a Macintosh Finder window, while in list view (accessed via the short-cut cmd-2) click-dragging is sensitive to where the initial click is.
If you are not on the file’s icon or filename text you will begin selecting multiple files in a continuous selection.

If, on the other hand, you click on the icon or text you will begin moving the file:

Another example: Adobe software contains many, many function buried in for which the only access is a tiny icon.

Therefore it pays to be observant small details of what you do and what you see when working on computers and to consciously hone your intuition of what constitutes a small detail.

Neither Hardware Nor Software Are Alive

Tempting as it may be, it doesn’t do any good to personify your computer or a piece of software.

Skype is acting up.
My computer hates me.
Blogger doesn’t like text pasted from MS Word.

Unless the sentiment is followed by a reality-based explanation or at least the curiosity to find one, you are not going avoid frustration.
Are other network services slow, note the time of day/week to see if there is a pattern.
My computer does not run smoothly when the hard-drive is almost full.
Don’t ever paste from MS Word into web-based application and expect it to work 100% of the time. To be on the safe side, paste into a text-only program like Wordpad (PC) or TextEdit (Mac)

Be Systematic

When you are trying to learn a new program or tackle a problem be systematic. Keep track of what you tried so that you don’t repeat yourself and so if you get help from someone and they say, “Have you tried X?”, you can answer with confidence. By all means take a stab at it, but guessing randomly is hard to manage.

Expert Use Is Efficient Use

Be eager to learn to use the software or the service the way the pros do, don’t shy away from it thinking it will be a lot of work. If you have ever seen a framer hit a nail in with 1 hit you know what I mean. Why wouldn’t you want to be able to do it like that? The ah-ha moment for me was when I was when I got a quick family portrait done last-minute style in a Taipei subway and watched the clerk retouch our photo in seconds. I had previously refused to learn keyboard short-cuts. I would have taken me an hour to do what this guy did. I told myself that day I was going to learn all the keyboard short-cuts in all the programs I use. Opps, that was fail. This conception of becoming an über-expert eroded down to the more manageable maxim: learn short-cuts for the functions you use the most. Start with cut, copy and paste.

What is this you say? You already use those? You ever switch between programs? Command-Tab (mac) Alt-Tab (PC) switches applications. If you do the job repeatedly, learn the short-cuts. On mac programs the short-cuts appear next to the commands in the menu. Here is a handy legend that shows which keys those funny symbols stand for.

This is not meant to suggest that short-cut usage equals expertise, just saying do it like an expert because it is easier in this case. Over time you will get an intuition for what the modifier keys do and what shortcuts are going to be in new programs.
*He had over 60 duels in his life, killed a man in a duel at age only 13 and never lost a duel.
**Adobe Illustrator, spent two years as a technical illustrator at a small company

COETAIL Course 3, Reflection 2

How can visual imagery support your curricular content? I do not ordinarily use static images while I am teaching so I was not sure how I was going to answer this question. It dawned on me that my images are used all the time by ISB teachers. I sat down with Gareth Huxtable to learn a little bit about how the annual Theatre Arts poster supports his curriculum. Firstly, I should say that Gareth is great to work with. This is the 4th poster I have done for his class. We always start with a carefully planned photoshoot. When I arrive the students are in costume or holding props. They are ready to pose and the whole shoot takes only about 15 minutes of my time. Gareth directs the posing I take the photos*. He has the right balance of giving input and allowing me to be creative. This year he suggested "B-Movie" for the theme. Here is a tutorial I used to help create the poster. Here is a vaguely paraphrased conversation I had with Gareth. Me: What does this poster do for your class? G: It creates a feeling of solidarity among the performers. It gives them confidence and gets them focus on the performance as a tangible event. Me: Why not do the poster yourself? G: The quality of the poster you make sort of raises the level. In this visual age, why not show the kids they are valued by having it done professionally? It gives them a bit of confidence, mainly that is what it is about. I don't know that professional is the right word, but I will take the complement. The student are fond of keeping the posters as a memento of the performance. Which, by the way will be in the Chevron Theater October at 3:00 on the 28th and again on the 29th. It seems natural to have an image to center a group activity around. The use of flags, mascots, logos and posters for can help unify the thinking and efforts of a group of people. In talking to Gareth it was interesting and unexpected to me that he saw curricular support value in having a quality image that the kids thought was cool. That creating such a poster was out of his reach without collaboration was less surprising. I am not sure what to make of that. Any thoughts? *This is a great tip for group shots in general. Have someone besides the photographer talking to the subjects to ensure no one is blocking anyone else, and give suggestions for poses.

COETAIL Course 3, Reflection 1 > how my teaching has been influenced to date by the course

How my teaching has been influenced to date by the course. The big shift in my thinking is that learning is an active process, done by the learner, and not to be given by the teacher. My role is to facilitate. What this translates to on the ground is more time listening to students to identify areas to bring up. The other day I was doing my annual sessions with HS Journalism giving a crash course on Adobe InDesign. While I would not characterize this program as the type of program you can just "pick up" by using, I can see that my approach has changed a great deal. In the past I have scheduled the meeting earlier in the year, in order to stop bad habits from occurring. I covered a wide range of specifically relevant features and practices for publishing a news journal. This year I scheduled our session later so that they were into their first months issue with questions and problems, I observed more and helped students where they wanted help. Retention is up, frustration is down and I have to say it is in a large part due to the project based learning resources we have used. image all rights reserved used with permission from Hugh MacLeod www.gapingvoid.com