Carol Gering

In addition to a little hiking, I spent a good deal of the long holiday weekend getting (back) up-to-speed on Lightroom. I’ve been using version 1 since it was first released. The first week of June I finally upgraded to version 2—approximately one week before version 3 was released! Adobe was good about it and sent me a free upgrade to 3.

In the process of learning what’s new, I’ve watched a couple dozen vodcasts. I highly recommend the Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips series from Matt Kloskowski. The casts are brief, to the point, and useful.

One of my favorite features of Lightroom 3 is the ability to publish directly to Flickr. It may seem like a small thing, but I’m convinced it will save me a lot of time. This isn’t like an uploader app. What’s unique about Lightroom’s functionality is the ability to take my adjusted RAW photo, convert it to jpg, connect with my Flickr account, and upload all in one step—taking my meta data with it. In the past I made my adjustments in Lightroom, then exported a jpg, uploaded to Flickr, and then deleted the jpg version from my hard drive. Lightroom 3 lets me bypass the jpg part, performing those steps automatically, behind the scenes. (I set preferences for quality, file size, etc. when I established my connection to the service.)

Further, Lightroom keeps track of which photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr. If I alter them later, Lightroom will republish the new version (replacing the old version on Flickr). One caveat: some data travels back to Lightroom from Flickr (tags, for example), but the description does not. So, if you change your description in Flickr and then republish, your description will be wiped out.

Here’s the confession:

I’ve read a half dozen books on lighting, attended workshops on the use of strobes, and frequented the Strobist blog…

I can give you definitions for the common vocabulary: E-TTL, dragging the shutter, slow shutter sync, fill flash, flash exposure compensation, high speed sync, second curtain sync, inverse square law…

…and yet my flash photography remains hit or miss (i.e., try various settings with some level of logic and hope for the best).

Here’s the problem:

Much of the information I’ve read and the workshops I’ve attended have focused on Nikon equipment. I know it should be transferrable knowledge, but I’m just not there yet!

Here’s the plan:

Reading: I’ve found a new book, Mastering Canon EOS Flash Photography. It’s specific to Canon, and I’m loving it!

Research: I’m actively looking for new online sources to follow. I’ve found a photographer named Zach Arias who’s using Canon and producing some training material. (In fact, he’s steaming live on UStream right now.) Not ready to recommend anything yet, but it’s a beginning.

Practice: This is undoubtedly the most important. I’m making a commitment to dedicate time this summer–and I’m saying it out loud to you here, so I’m really on the hook.

That’s it. Just trying to make myself accountable to follow through on this!

I often ruminate on the effectiveness of my own teaching. Particularly at the end of a semester, I find it helpful to reflect on the successes and frustrations of the methods I used. In an effort toward teaching more openly, I decided to have that conversation with myself right here…

Background

My spring class was CIOS F258, Digital Photography and Image Correction. I taught in a classroom equipped as a lab, with a computer for each student.

Online Components

Although this is a face-to-face class, I require students to participate in online activities as well. After several years of teaching in this manner, this has become institutionalized practice for me. I’ve experimented with several variations of this:

• Class wiki
• Individual student blogs
• Class blog
• Blackboard course site
• Flickr

My strategy has been to limit online activity to just two of these during any given semester. In the past, I’ve used a combination of a class blog on blogger and a Flickr group—without Blackboard. This semester I used Blackboard (because I wanted students to have access to their individual grades) and a Flickr group. I eliminated the class blog and put announcements and assignment deadlines on Blackboard. I have to say, I missed the class blog this semester. Even though I’ve never done a great job with keeping the class blog fresh, I miss the aesthetic layout; Blackboard feels so sterile and compartmentalized.

Use of Class Time

In previous years I divided almost every class session into segments for 1) hands-on camera use and 2) photoshop. Based on feedback from a former student, I tried to be more focused this semester. Rather than having students take photos during each class, I consolidated the hands-on camera time into two intensive 3-hour studio sessions. During the other class sessions, I focused on either photography concepts or photoshop techniques—but not both in the same week. There were pros and cons to this approach. On the positive side, I think the studio sessions were very effective. On the negative side, by limiting the class time to either camera or photoshop (not both), I had more trouble filling the 3-hour timeframe. Particularly when we were working in Photoshop, three hours seemed too long. At the point I could see students were no longer absorbing anything new, I truncated the material and allowed time for them to practice (or to leave if they felt confident in the skills we’d covered). This resulted in several class sessions being shorter than usual. Next time I teach this course I’ll try something in between: more focused than my original method, but more integrated than what I did this semester.

Feedback to Students

Without exception, this always feels like my greatest weakness. I believe strongly in the importance of feedback, but I really dread grading! Best things I did this semester were the project and the print report. These both carried high-point value; I created grading rubrics to outline what I expected (and make it easier for me to “be tough” when grading). The thing I’m worst at: making students accountable. In short, I’m a pushover. As a prime example, I need to be firm about requiring students to tag their assignment photos properly on Flickr. I tried to be more consistent this semester in deducting points for late submission. My method for grading Flickr participation became overwhelming and I didn’t keep up well.

Conclusion

It was a good semester. As always, I feel regret for the pieces I didn’t do well, but I believe students learned—and, that’s the ultimate success. Primary changes for the next time I teach this class will be: re-instituting a class blog, finding a way to streamline Flickr grading, and integrating camera practice and photoshop skills during some of the class sessions.

U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies, Washington,D.C., 2009.  Available Online.

This report has been sitting on my desk for about a month. I finally found time to review it, and I must say, I’m impressed. This is a very thorough meta-study of quantitative research on online education, executed carefully, with good statistical analysis.

Bottom Line: “Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.” The study notes that this result isn’t validation of the medium, per se, but of multiple factors that may accompany online instruction (such as expanded time on task).

Evidence of Effectiveness: The nine studies related to learner reflection “…found that a tool or feature prompting students to reflect on their learning was effective in improving outcomes.” This factor was supported strongly. By contrast, studies of courses that included online simulations found the learning improvement only modestly positive. Surprisingly, studies that compared online environments using different media elements “…found no significant differences among media combinations.” As an example, one study evaluating the inclusion of graphics, navigation options, and color found no improvement in learning outcomes over a plain, text-based interface.

Lots more useful information and analysis is available in this report, as well as a rich list of references.

I admit it: I love Cool Iris. It’s just so elegant and beautiful.

If you’re unfamiliar with Cool Iris, it’s a browser plugin that currently works with Firefox (Windows XP/Vista, Mac, and Linux), Internet Explorer, Safari (Mac) and Flock. It allows you to preview images and video on an “infinite wall” and then enlarge any that catch your eye. The interface is an approximation of scrolling through items on an iPhone. A key benefit is the speed with which you can sort through a large quantity of images and enlarge specific images—much faster, for example, than clicking through sequential photo pages on Flickr.

Web sites have to be enabled to work with Cool Iris (examples of enabled sites are Flickr, Hulu, Facebook, Google Images, YouTube), but you can also use Cool Iris to view images on your own computer.

As enamored as I am with the interface, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that one might use it as a presentation tool…until I followed a link from Chris Lott’s blog to the Open Ed Conference presentation by Alan Levine.  What a great idea! This could be useful in either my digital photography class or my desktop publishing class when I’m lecturing on elements of design or composition. Besides being significantly faster than the media tools I normally use for presentation, it will let me easily jump from image to image rather than (only) viewing them sequentially. I’m excited to give it a try!

I was fortunate to participate in the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) at the end of June. As to be expected, the sessions I attended were a mixed bag—some useful and informative, others not so much. The most practical session I attended was a 3-hour lab on Delivering Curriculum and Building Portfolios with Acrobat PDFs. I’m looking forward to more experimentation with Acrobat Portfolios! In the meantime, here’s a quick tip that I learned…

Acrobat Professional comes with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) built in! Amazing… and why didn’t I know that before?!

Here’s how it works:

1. open a pdf document
2. from the Document menu, select OCR text recognition > recognize text using OCR
3. choose the page range you want to read and click OK

You get a series of slider bars that indicate activity, and then…nothing. At least, nothing apparent.

1. go to File > Export > Word Document
2. save the file

Voila! When you open the file using MS Word, you’ll see the OCR results. In the simple test I did, it seemed to work pretty well. Note that you can also export from pdf to a word document without doing optical character recognition, but you only get an image of the page rather than editable text.

I just came across an Open Education Resource that I think may be especially valuable. Teachers’ Domain is an online repository of media resources for educational use, gathered primarily from public television. There are three editions of the site: K-12, college, and an edition specific to New York State educators. The college edition has a number of resources for Science, as well as Engineering and Technology. The K-12 edition has many more resources available than the college edition, but some of the movies for grade 12 could also be applicable for developmental studies and 100-level courses. There is also a “special collections” area that includes—among other things— an Alaska Native Perspectives on Earth and Climate. You may need to create an account to access some of the content.

You’ll want to note the license agreement for any resources you use. As typical with OERs, the licenses range from link and view only, to remix and share with attribution.

Major funding for the site was provided by the National Science Foundation.

The Instructional Design Center (IDC) at University of Alaska Southeast Sikta (UAS) in collaboration with the Center for Distance Education (CDE) at University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) offered the first annual iTeach² (advanced) workshop for UA faculty last week. By all accounts, it was a successful and productive week! Heidi Olson and I represented CDE as instructors and facilitators, joined by Mary Purvis, Susie Feero, and Maureen O’Halloran of UAS. We met on the Sitka campus. Chris Lott delivered the keynote from Fairbanks.

iTeach² was a great opportunity to collaborate with instructional designers and educators from other campuses. I came away from the week with several new links and ideas. Two ideas in particular stand out:

1. Keep a journal of each course taught. This is such an obvious idea…but I’d never thought of it! I always tweak courses each time I offer them, based on successes and failures of the previous semester, but I just never thought about keeping a journal as I’m teaching.
2. The spreadsheet application in Google Docs allows you to generate a form for students to complete. The link to the form can be pasted into Blackboard; as students submit their data on the form, it populates the spreadsheet. The results can then be shared back to students as a graph or chart. In effect, each student sees a form for data entry and the cumulative class data—with or without ever seeing the spreadsheet that generated the chart.

I finally got around to purchasing a couple of rolls of seamless paper to use as photography backgrounds. Let me just say that getting them delivered to Fairbanks was painful (mostly due to the cost!). After shopping around and finding the prices from all vendors very comparable, I ordered from B & H. The paper comes in a large roll—9 feet wide—with a length of 36 feet. The cost is $43.99 per roll, and shipping it to Fairbanks is $40 per roll (no significant discount for purchasing more than one roll and shipping them together).

In response to the sticker shock for shipping, I opted to build a homemade stand rather than purchasing one.

Here are my first results:

I should mention that even with the white background paper and good lighting it still takes me about 30 minutes in Photoshop to create a perfectly isolated image.

Inside Higher Ed featured an article today on the strategies used by University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) to deal with failure in gateway courses like developmental math. There were a number of similarities with our situation, including university focus on access rather than exclusivity (demonstrated by a high acceptance rate for applicants). According to the article, UTEP has determined that their current structure for developmental ed isn’t working well, so they’re exploring new strategies to improve student success.

Highlighted efforts include increased interaction with high schools, six-hour refresher sessions held immediately prior to placement exams, and free access to ALEKS (computer-based math exercises that the Math Department at UAF uses for many courses). Their goal is to divert students from enrolling unnecessarily in developmental courses. Among other motivations (like decreased funding), one rationale seems to be that the stigma of developmental placement negatively impacts student success.

This is particularly interesting to me in light of our recent decision to create an open courseware version of developmental math—with the stated goal of providing student practice and avoiding the stigma that might be associated with failure in a a credit-bearing course.