Monday, July 31, 2017

Educational technology with the most potential

Within the past 10 years, communication devices have drastically changed the world and the way we all interact.  With the demise of the phone call, students will need to master all forms of communication for their future careers, most importantly written communication and video.  It’s an interesting proposition, to suggest video as a prominent form of communication, but it isn’t just because I do it for a living.  Video has become ubiquitous with social media. Scroll through Facebook or even Instagram; much of the shared content we see, from both peers and corporate organizations alike, is video content.  Video uses multiple ways of communicating messages.  Whether through direct information, storytelling, or visual portrayal, creating a video requires skills beyond just the written word.  Effectively communicating through video is similar to effectively communicating in real life, but can help to communicate intangibles and thoughts by bringing in creativity and audio/visual aids.  Understanding what goes into the production of a video will also help students to better organize their thoughts, effectively plan and outline, and consider how their message will connect with an audience, something that cannot be understated.

            While my current position isn’t tied to education, I do have the ability to teach within a digital learning lab where students can learn to use digital tools for their college courses.  I’d say that the greatest barrier to integrating technology within higher education is acceptance by the professors.  As time passes, more and more professors are starting to see the benefits of new methods of communication and have the desire to incorporate technology other than PowerPoint into their classrooms.  But for institutions and departments that are known for traditional methods of research and have proven to be strong in their field, the incentive to change is minimal.  My personal belief on choosing any new technology follow the thought process of:  is it proven?  What does a successful example look like? How difficult is it to learn?  Will it get in the way of the task at hand or will it augment it?  For me, I think that video projects and digital storytelling has positively answered all of those questions.

This post was shared in a discussion forum in my graduate course "Integration and Management of Computers for Learning" at Purdue University.

Monday, May 22, 2017

Demonstrating my disposition for life-long learning and continuous professional development

I have been a multimedia professional for the past 10 years and was hired one year ago as a Multimedia Specialist in the Office of Communications at Princeton University. Apart from visiting trade websites and analyzing online tutorials on a regular basis, I’d like to demonstrate my disposition for life-long learning and continuous professional development by discussing my recent experience with the largest conference in the United States for video professionals, the NAB Show (National Association of Broadcasters). NAB hosts two shows each year, one in New York City and another, larger show in Las Vegas. This year I was able to attend the event in New York City. Although I could not make the Las Vegas show, I still followed the conference online and kept up on keynote speakers and presentations.

At the New York City NAB Show, I was able to be hands-on with the latest equipment and speak with representatives about how to improve my workflow and output. I built relationships that began at this show and was able to follow up with both Canon and Panasonic representatives to have them come to my office, evaluate our current inventory, and discuss options for improving the quality of my office’s multimedia presence online. From those meetings, I was introduced to local vendors to help implement the new equipment into our workflow.

The artifact that I included is one of many presentations that I viewed online from the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. This particular example demonstrated Clemson University’s athletic video production workflow, which not only produced web-ready content, but also expertly integrated with Adobe products to turn content around almost instantly for social media, which they referred to as “content velocity.” It was inspiring to see how they were able to organize a team of student videographers and a staff of content professionals to produce constant, and more importantly on-time and relevant, social media content during their football games. I was able to learn about new tools that Adobe had recently released and how Clemson was able to adopt them to streamline their production methods. Additionally, it was great to see their process for organization and retrieval and how efficient it was for a fast-paced environment. It is a presentation that I intend to share with my colleagues and social media team to see if my office could incorporate some of the tools they use so that we can produce better social media content and work more collaboratively as a whole.

I hope to continue to engage in these types of experiences to not only increase my own potential, but suggest new ideas and creative approaches to familiar situations within whatever working environment I find myself in the coming years.

Clemson Athletics: Social Media Video and Content Velocity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_i1V7ObJ58



This is a repost from a competency demonstration from my graduate work in Learning Design and Technology at Purdue University.



Friday, May 12, 2017

Adobe gives the Premiere an overhaul and how I plan to teach it

Adobe updates Premiere

Adobe released updates for 2017 to many of their Creative Cloud applications this past April.  To my daily editor, Adobe Premiere, they'd added some much appreciated updates, including a revision to the dated Title tool and updated audio mixing options.  While I haven't yet had a chance to work with the latest version yet (the update downloading as I type this blog post), I really look forward to the updated titles, which should speed up my workflow in adding motion graphics and animated lower-thirds to my projects directly rather than flipping between Premiere and After Effects.  However, DaVinci Resolve, a well-established color grading tool, has been slowly increasing the capabilities of the software and recently purchased and incorporated professional audio software.  This makes DaVinci significantly more appealing to someone like myself and its intuitive interface is certainly a welcome sight over Adobe's (though to Adobe's credit, they have gotten better with the inclusion of their workspace panels).  I plan to work in DaVinci Resolve for a smaller project to see how the workflow compares to Adobe's.

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/the-latest-and-greatest-for-premiere-pro-cc-and-media-encoder/?segment=dva


http://www.newsshooter.com/2017/05/03/51093/



Teaching Adobe Premiere this coming Fall

I also came across this Adobe Live Stream Series - How to Make Great Videos.  I am currently working on developing my own Adobe Premiere workshop for the Digital Learning Lab at Princeton.  I always like to see how other instructors approach teaching software and what they emphasize compared to what I emphasize.  While my future students could simply watch a series such as this one, which is an excellent in-depth view of Premiere, I will need to take a more targeted approach.  Students who will be attending my workshop will more than likely be doing so to fulfill a video requirement for a class.  Many of these students are taking four or five courses at Princeton and won't have the time to dedicate to six hours to learning a software package for a single assignment.  However, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, this is the type of new literacy that I believe students will need to be successful in their future careers.  Knowing this, my approach will be to provide them with the technical skills, abilities, and judgement to make the fundamental choices for crafting messages in a digital story.  Because Premiere now handles multiple video formats without transcoding, students won't need to understand more complex things like video codecs, at least not initially.  My hope is to guide them toward creating effective stories and instill an interest to further develop a 21st century means of communication.

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/live-stream-series-how-to-make-great-videos/?segment=dva

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Internet literacy in modern education

The Internet is definitely more of a literacy issue than a technology issue. “The Internet [should be seen] not as a technology but rather as a context in which to read, write, and communicate. The Internet is no more a technology than is a book” (Leu, O’Byrne, Zawilinski, McVerry & Everett-Cacopardo, 2009. p.265). The Internet is an access point to a 21st Century way of communication, reading, and information consumption. To view the Internet as a technology, or a tool, is to vastly underestimate its modern capabilities, ignore the functioning and connectivity of the modern world, and deprive students of valuable resources that will help them to assimilate into their careers and into modern society.

Leu et al. touched on the economic differences and test scores briefly when they wrote, “Children in the poorest school districts in the United States have the least amount of Internet access at home [and] the greatest pressure to raise scores on tests…and schools do not always prepare them for the new literacies of online reading comprehension at school” (p. 267). I think that moving forward, personal biases, such as the older generation of teachers and instructors who are technology averts, will begin to thin out as 21st Century students, like myself, being to make their way into the field. I hear about it now in public schools and even some colleges, where teachers don’t want to change they way they teach because they are tenured, have been doing it the same way for 15+ years, and just want to continue using the same method because it worked in the past. While it may have worked in the past, the world is ever changing and education should be as fluid as the real world. The second component that I find limiting the adoption of technology tools in the classroom is budgeting. Districts don’t allow enough funding to go toward technology integration, which is a difficult balance between tax dollars, population, and number of schools. I think that it will be difficult for the public school system to enable teachers to utilize technologies in the classroom until there is enough proven success from local private schools that perform as well or better on standardized testing. While standardized testing is another discussion, I believe it is what is holding back many schools from raising their technology standards because they don’t see the correlation of a partnered learning experience like Prensky (2010) suggests and a measurement of success statewide. I think from an Instructional Designer’s and future instructor’s standpoint, we can begin suggesting alternative ways to approach lessons that will begin to explore and showcase the benefits of technology and internet literacy so that others will be more willing to realize its place in the modern world.

This was a discussion post copied from my graduate school work in Learning Design & Technology at Purdue University.


References

Leu, D. J., O’Bryne, W. I., Zawilinski, L., McVerry, G., & Everett-Cacopardo, H. (2009). Expanding the new literacies conversation. Educational Researcher, 38(4), 264-269.


Prensky, M. (2010). Teaching Digital Natives - Partnering for Real Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, A SAGE Company.



Wednesday, March 22, 2017

The grey area of intelligence: Blurring the line between artificial and genuine intellect.


You’ve seen the films: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bladerunner, Terminator, AI, Wall-E, and countless others. At a time when computer technology was in its infancy, it was exciting to think about the possibilities of robot intelligence and their relationships with humans. However, in the 21st century, amidst a vast expanse of computer engineering and learning technologies, integrative robots are rather common. They build our cars, build our computers, search for the closest burger joint, and even assess our online shopping habits. As engineers continue to push the limits of what computers and robots are capable of, could we, some day in the near future, find ourselves educating robots? Would educators be involved in the programming of AI to incorporate self-learning? What level of educational theory is integrated into designing these types of robots? Starting with a blank slate allows developers the flexibility to hyper-focus the “mind” of the robot on specific tasks without the learning differences between students or distractions humans encounter in everyday life. Being able to do this inherently cures many of the difficulties educators encounter when trying to teach others. Companies, such as OpenAI in Silicon Valley, are constantly working toward robot learning and communication.
“With early humans, language came from necessity. They learned to communicate because it helped them do other stuff, gave them an advantage over animals. These OpenAI researchers want to create the same dynamic for bots. In their virtual world, the bots not only learn their own language, they also use simple gestures and actions to communicate—pointing in particular direction, for instance, or actually guiding each other from place to place—much like babies do. That too is language, or at least a path to language.” (Wired, 2017.)
However, when will robots stop learning? Will they be programmed to learn only to improve upon specific tasks or will their curiosity be boundless? If they are connected to the internet, they could potentially never stop learning. Of course, each robot will be limited to its design; the amount of memory it can store, it’s functionality and articulation, and its battery power will presumably all be limiting factors in what a robot can actually accomplish. But is it no longer preposterous to ponder about a day when robots educate us?
“In the end, success will likely come from a combination of [learning and programming] techniques, not just one. And [researcher Igor] Mordatch is proposing yet another technique—one where bots don’t just learn to chat. They learn to chat in a language of their own making. As humans have shown, that is a powerful idea.” (Wired, 2017.)
I just hope Will Smith is still around to save us from the takeover.

References

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/openai-builds-bots-learn-speak-language/


Monday, March 6, 2017

A Shift in Reality: Embracing VR



          I came across two articles on Wired.com recently regarding virtual and augmented reality. I’ve heard of Oculus, I’ve seen participants willing to sacrifice their humility to become a spectacle at a Microsoft Store demonstration in the middle of a shopping mall, and I’ve seen Samsung commercials where teenagers get a good laugh from watching an older man experience virtual reality for the first time. However, these encounters have been in passing or mindlessly scrolling through social media headlines. I have never heard any concrete information about the progression of VR and I have never experienced it first-hand. Interestingly, though, developers seem to be tirelessly working toward the advancement of creating a virtual world, even though they aren’t quite sure of its application yet.

          Google has become increasingly ambitious in the field and created a team called DayDream Labs which "has one job: make stuff. They take a straightforward question or hypothesis—How do you leave a comment in VR? What should people’s legs look like? Is virtual horticulture fun? —and build the simplest prototype they can to test it out” (Wired, 2017.). Mark Rolston, founder of Argo Design, is interested in producing products that augment reality. He claims that there's a "giant design opportunity [in] bringing more humanity to computing...that's what the promise of augmented reality is. Bringing computing into the situations we already find ourselves in naturally" (Wired, 2017.). His hopes are that computing will be able to project a digital reality on top of our existing world. It seems like a cross between the forgotten Google Glass and Star Wars. Google is also diligent in creating a more realistic virtual world. By removing controllers, Google is focusing on using the body to interact with computers in a digital environment, and they recently acquired the company Eyefluence to further develop eye-tracking capabilities.

          But what are the practical applications for technology such as this? What are educational applications, or professional video, or even social media? Education could adopt virtual reality to enhance the experience of students engaged in situated learning, where they could perhaps interact with a virtual version of the environment. This could particularly interesting for medical students, who could have the ability to observe procedures that aren't as frequently performed or if there aren't any available patients. It could also immerse students in another culture or location, such as walking the streets of Beijing during the Chinese New Year or visiting the White House. I'm not quite sure how professional filmmakers would incorporate VR. Could movies be immersive? Is it a possibility that I could be standing next to Scarlet Johansen in her next film and be able to look around the scene? Could VR films replace 3D films? Being able to move throughout a film is probably not ideal, as you'd want to experience the narrative, not walk around their world. Or would you? Either way, I see video professionals becoming integral to the development of virtual reality, as their expertise in content creation will help to develop the alternative world.

          Immersive social media seems like a real possibility, but is a little terrifying to me. Being able to live and interact in world that doesn't really exist is an outlandish thought. Could it allow users to virtually visit friends who have moved across country or family across the globe? Sure, but a video chat is effective at doing that now. I don't immediately see the benefits to social interactions in a virtual world, but I'm sure a need will be created. It's definitely strange to think that a whole new world could be created and exist in a set of circuit boards. It reminds me a of an episode of the X Files where a virtual shooter game was the gateway to another dimension dominated by a virtual character who was out for blood. I just hope it works out better for us than it did for Mulder and Scully.



References

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/google-daydream-vr-feels-human/
https://www.wired.com/2015/05/google-cardboard-virtual-reality/