Final Reflections

It was a great week! Below is a video sharing our final reflections on the pilot.

Production

Today was production day. The thing that I found most challenging was finding music. In other digital media projects I have done music was always important. However, I thought finding the right music to convey messages and moods created by the art was even more difficult than normal productions. You can see the importance music plays in the podcasts that are professionally produced at for the museum.

De Forest’s work conveys a lot of themes and moods. I was unable to find one piece of music that could cover all of the contrasts in the painting. What I ended up doing was using a site called Looposonic. They have free loops of music that are copyright free that you can download to use in your media productions. I spent a lot of time listening to guitar loops. I was able to download some of these loops and paste them into Audacity (a free audio editor you can download from the Internet), sometimes putting multiple loops together to compose my own music.

The way de Forest’s pieces together of shapes with repeating patterns in his paintings reminds me of a quilt. As I was piecing together music clips to enhance the voiceovers it struck me that it felt a lot like piecing together an audio quilt.

I have never done a digital media piece centered around a piece of art before. I found that I used Photoshop a great deal. This allowed me to crop pieces of the artwork I wanted to talk about. I could also resize the image to better fit the dimensions of the video-screen better. I was also able to use the paint tools to paint over brush stokes to bring certain aspects to the forefront that I wanted to talk about. It was an interesting sensation to digitally paint over a painting.

Another cool thing about using media to talk about art is you can zoom in closer than you can really see with the human eye and really look at texture and brush strokes. As we were editing Allison and I talked about the fact that while a vodcast is made to be played on a video iPod, a lot of viewers will not download it to their iPod but look at it full size on their computer. So we were continually looking at in iPod dimensions and full computer screen. It is an interesting challenge to simultaneously design for both.

The Power of Questioning

Writing a script is not a linear process. For example, Rachelle Doorley the Interim Director of Education at the San Jose Museum of Art was telling me that in a recent podcast that they did a free-lance writer wrote the initial script. She reviewed the script and made changes. Then she sent the script to a colleague in the education department who sent it back with changes. Then they sent it to the curator of the exhibit for feedback. Then the person who was doing the voice-overs had some questions which led to more revisions. In total the script went through five major revisions.

Rachelle went over our script and gave us some very helpful feedback. First of all the script was too long. They would like us to shoot for a 45-90 seconds. Also our script primarily tells about the painting. Instead she would like it to be two way conversation. One where we offer what we see, but also ask questions to help the viewer go deeper in looking at the piece of artwork. Rachelle said we should be hesitant about putting an answer our there, because it could stop people from trying to think for themselves. Contemporary art is about opening up people’s minds to look at the work in a different way. Research says that when people go to art museums on average they spend about 5 seconds looking at a painting. The purpose of the vodcast should be to help them go deeper and to facilitate viewer interpretation. A metaphor she gave me was it is about seeing someone famous vs. having a deep conversation with a friend. These vodcasts should offer a new voice on these pieces of artwork from a Teacher Perspective. That will require participants to consider what lens they want to look at the artwork from and what story they will tell.

Visual Literacy Day

Today was our first day of our pilot project of creating a vodcast for the San Jose Museum of Art.

I spent a lot of time going on school tours led by gallery teachers at the museum to work on my visual literacy skills. The museum staff was piloting a new program where they use questioning strategies about selected pieces of art to help students develop visual thinking strategies or (VTS). I also did some journaling and sketching throughout the day.

The museum staff asked us to choose a piece of artwork to use for our vodcast. We chose Slow Time in Arcadia by Roy de Forest. One of the reasons I chose it is because it had a sense of a story to it that I thought would lend itself well to a vodcast. I also thought the bright colors would make it easier to film and photograph. Allison chose it because she was drawn to the vividness and colors of the piece. She said, "This is a great California piece. The colors and style look like it is from the Western United States. San Jose is a great place to have this piece of art".

Late in the day we met with two members of the museum education staff. They led us through our own VTS discussion on our piece. This process is really helpful because when listening to others ideas you discover things about the piece you would have never picked up by yourself. As Rochelle Doorley told us, "VTS allows you to go further than you can go on your own with a piece of work".

Tonight we are working on our draft. We've tossed it back and forth between us a couple of times. It is nearing midnight and we are beginning to really like what we've written. We are going to email it off to Joan our third instructor for her feedback. It's been a good day!

San Jose Digital Media Pilot

August 11th-14th, The Stephens Group is offering a digital media course for educators in San Jose, California. The course will be held at the San Jose Museum of Art. Participants will work with instructors from The Stephens Group and museum staff to create vodcasts around artwork in the museum. All comfort levels with technology are welcome. Participants can receive CEUs or 1 graduate credit.

This week instructors are at the museum doing a pilot vodcast. We will be blogging about the
process throughout the week. The following video shows some of the hopes and fears of the instructors the day before the pilot.



More information about the course is available at our website at http://www.thestephensgroup.com/sjdmc.php .

Go Pack Go!

At yesterday's EETT conference call meeting Kim Desotell shared some quotes from Vince Lombardi on leadership.

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

Individual commitment to a group effort that is what makes a team work, a company work, a school work, a society work, a civilization work.

Fatigue makes cowards of us all.

Collaborative Writing Guide for Google Docs

The Google Education website has some great resources for teaching collaborative writing with the use of Google Docs. It includes step-by-step directions including screen shots of how to use Google Docs. It also includes a Collaborative Revision Checklist for students and a teachers manual on how to teach collaborative writing skills with Google Docs.

Advanced Wiki Tips

On Saturday I went to a workshop taught by Stu Woodward at Adams Middle School in Redondo Beach, CA as part of the Beach City Computer Using Educators.

In the past I had primarily used wikis for sharing text, links and collaborating with other instructors from The Stephens Group. Through the workshop I learned about a lot of other cool things you can do with your wiki.

For instance, I did not know that you could check statistics about visitors to your wiki by going to Manage Spaces and clicking on Usage Statistics. I was surprised to learn that our wiki from last year's digital media conference received a number of visitors from other countries.

I had also not played with the Insert Widget feature on the wiki (it looks like a little TV). The convergence of media that you can incorporate into your wiki is truely amazing. You can embed videos, audio, a calendar, maps, slideshows and even interactive surveys into your wiki. I tried embedding a google map of a satellite view of the Milwaukee County Zoo. I loved how once the map is embedded you can click on it and still manipulate the map just like you can in Google maps. The woman sitting next to me said she was going to create a wiki for her team and embed a shared Google Calendar for the group.

Another useful feature I learned is that when browsing other educational wikis you can add wikis that are of interest to you by clicking on the star next to the title. Then when you click on your user name at the top a window will appear with a list of your favorite wikis.

Bill Gates Last Day

Tammy Lind sent me this video on Bill Gates last day at Microsoft.


Bill Gates spoofs his future

Intel and Negroponte Split Over the $100 Laptop

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both ran articles this week about Intel leaving Negroponte's OLPC Nonprofit Organization. OLPC is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to bring learning opportunities to the most remote and poorest children of the world by providing connected, low-cost and rugged laptops to each and every child in their daily lives.

Intel had paid $6 million and promised to contribute another $12 million to Negroponte's organization. The dispute is over Intel's aggressive marketing of the Classmate PC.

Reflection on my use of Web 2.0 tools in 2007

As I reflect on my work-life in 2007, there are a number new of Web 2.0 tools I’m utilizing that have become fully integrated into how I work and interact with people.

Skype allows you to conduct free calls over the internet or chat with others online. This tool has been invaluable in keeping connected with family and colleagues.

GoToMeeting is a form of web-conferencing. The Stephens Group uses GoToMeeting to work collaboratively on projects with one another and with our clients.n We also use it for internal training purposes.

We use GoogleDocs to allow committees to collaborate on documents such as Information Technology Plans. This saves a lot of time. Prior to Google Docs we would have to email versions of the document to committee members and make changes. The use of Google Docs has really streamlined this process because there is always one true version that everyone in the group can log-onto and update. Another great feature is you can see who made what changes when. I have all of my GoogleDocs linked onto my iGoogle web page which I have set as my homepage. I have also added useful Google widgets such as the weather, online dictionary and thesaurus and tabbed links to personal bookmarks as well.

We use CollectiveX internally within The Stephens Group. We have a number of different teams working on different types of projects. One of the advantages of CollectiveX is it allows members the opportunity to share contact information, discuss issues of concern, share information and upload files that need to be shared among consultants for different projects, and allows us to keep a shared calendar. Another great feature of CollectiveX is that it emails consultants updates that have been made.

Bloglines is a blog aggregator. What that means is it grabs new entries to the blogs I have subscribed to. This means that I can quickly read a number of entries without having to go to each blog individually. Subscribing to blogs has allowed me to keep on top of new trends and ideas in educational technology better than traditional media such as magazine subscriptions.

I wrote about Clipmarks in my blog entry on Shaping the Flow of Media. This tool has been great in helping me hang on to and catagorize things I find interesting when reading my blog feeds. The ability to “clip” and “tag” things to add to my library has been a huge help in organizing online content.

This year we had our first digital media conference. We were so impressed with the podcasts that teachers produced at the Milwaukee Public Museum. We are really looking forward to our second conference being held at the Milwaukee County Zoo, July 28th-31st.

In 2007, The Stephens Group developed two wikis. One for our Digital Media Conference as a way for our instructors to share resources with our participants, and one to help our clients with strategic planning on their information technology plans (The Stephens Group Information Technology Planning Wiki).

The addition of a clustermap to our blog has been a great addition. I love logging on and finding out where in the world people are reading our blog from. It has helped motivate me to keep writing.

In 2008 The Stephens Group will be learning more about digital mapping, the power of meta-tagging content, vodcasting at the San Jose Museum of Art (August 11^th- 13^th), using iPods to assist ELL students (see us at CUE), using social networking tools such as Facebook and Linked In to connect with wider audiences, as well as exploring the potential of gaming in education.

We hope you will continue to read our blog throughtout 2008 as we explore these new technologies.

Think Before You Ban: How Classrooms Become Communities with Web 2.0 Technology

Don't miss the next CoSN webcast entitled Think Before you Ban: How Classrooms Become Communities with Web 2.0 on January 16th at 1:00pm EST.

As user-generated content and social networking take over student social lives, can they also be used for instruction? By leveraging these new technologies within the school firewall, teachers and students make the most of technology for collaborative learning. They also have the opportunity to discuss acceptable behavior and learn how to be responsible members of an online community. We discuss positive uses of these technologies and lessons learned by practitioners.

• Karen Greenwood Henke, Author and Speaker, Nimble Press, San Francisco, CA (Moderator)
• Kevin Jarrett, Technology Facilitator, K-4, District Webmaster and Google Certified Teacher, Northfield Community School, NJ
• Connie Sitterley, Technology Director, Penncrest School District, PA
• Susan Brooks-Young, Web 2.0 Consultant

You can register for the webcast at http://www.cosn.org/events/webcasts/2008.cfm#January08 . CoSN members can attend the conference for free. Non-CoSN members need to pay a registration fee of $59.00. Click here to learn how you can become a CoSN member.